In a rash of annual predictions, T- Mobile big cheese John Legere claims that “Wearables and phablets will be the big device stories of 2015”.…
Budget telco TalkTalk is reportedly pursuing a buyout of video-streaming service Blinkbox from Tesco.…
Access to Gmail in China appears to have at least been partially restored, after Google's web addresses were blocked over the weekend.…
Twitter reported a partial outage yesterday, which it said had been due to a bug in its "front end code".…
Top Chinese mobile phone manufacturer Xiaomi has confirmed reports that it has raised $1.1bn to fund its plans for world domination.…
Sony's PlayStation network is slowly returning to normal service roughly 48 hours after it was hit by another major denial-of-service attack on Christmas Day.…
The developers of Tor, the software that tries to mask netizens' identities on the internet, have responded after a gang of hackers appeared to flood the anonymizing network with 3,000 new relays.…
The “landmark agreement” between the government and the mobile phone operators has been reported as a coup, something worthy, and a step forward. However, scratch the surface and it’s merely a face-saving exercise.…
The Irish government today supported Microsoft in its ongoing fight against US prosectors – who appear to want access to server hard drives anywhere in the world.…
The internet community is split when it comes to who should be given the right to run the critical IANA functions.…
Rackspace says it has recovered from a nasty distributed denial of service attack that it says may have seen “a portion of legitimate traffic to our DNS infrastructure … inadvertently blocked.”…
The US Federal Communications Commission says it misplaced a huge tranche of public comments on its net neutrality proposals – and has blamed its outdated IT system.…
Top hotel chains want permission to jam guests' personal Wi-Fi hotspots – a move that would force people to use expensive hotel wireless instead.…
BT is trumpeting a new test which will see it install broadband in some really hard-to-reach locations: the middle of cities. Well, provided it can get into the building in the first place.…
As foreshadowed last week, Australia's dominant telco, Telstra, will acquire Pacnet.…
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has once again put a hold on Comcast's controversial proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable (TWC), saying it needs more time to review documents in the case.…
If the North Koreans really do have an elite hacking squad, it'll be twiddling its thumbs at the moment, as all internet activity in the country has gone dark in an outage that bears the hallmarks of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.…
The controversial NetMundial Initiative (NMI) may be heading back to the drawing board following a meeting of the internet's big cheeses in Washington last week.…
The Brixton Pound (B£), the private currency for denizens of the slightly more affordable bit of earth next to Clapham, is to adopt near field communications, or NFC, payments.…
Microsoft is terminating its SharePoint Online Public Website service, effective January 2015.…
Torrent site ISOhunt has created a roll-your-own, open source, version of infamous file-sharing site The Pirate Bay.…
Analyst firm IDC reckons that cloud operations – private and public - now account for “almost a third” of the world's spending on servers, storage and ethernet switches.…
T-Mobile US will pay out $90m to settle cramming allegations brought by the US Federal Trade Commission.…
T-Mobile US has agreed to pay out at least $90m to settle cramming allegations with the US Federal Trade Commission.…
Xavier Niel, the owner of French ISP and mobile phone company Iliad, is buying Orange Switzerland for CHF2.8bn (€2.3bn) from VC Apax Partners.…
As well as finding out that Jennifer Lawrence earns less than her male counterparts, movie execs are self-important a-holes and Sony has a password policy that a baby could break, it turns out that the movie company is also seeking to DESTROY THE INTERNET with a ten-page legal memo.…
NBN Co has updated its product roadmap and Telstra has revealed it will help the company to plan future deployments.…
Verizon reckons the FCC's net neutrality proposals can not stop ISPs and websites signing interconnect deals to increase streaming speeds to subscribers.…
Teradata has bought RainStor, the deduping database supplier and Hadoop convert.…
Blighty’s government has announced a new deal with the top four mobe operators in the country to improve the state of so-called mobile roaming "not-spots".…
Microsoft has published a full, frank, and ugly account of just what went wrong when Azure Storage entered Total Inability To Support Usual Performance – TITSUP - mode in November.…
IBM's cloudy concern SoftLayer has decided it'll be better off if it joins Equinix's Cloud Exchange.…
Yet another group has filed suit against Sprint, alleging the US telco unfairly profited from phone bill cramming.…
Oracle beat analysts' estimates for once for the second quarter of its fiscal 2015, with an earnings report that otherwise showed only modest results.…
Australia's dominant telecommunications company, Telstra, has told the nation's stock exchange “that it is in discussions with the owners of Pacnet around a potential transaction to acquire the company.”…
US mobile carrier Sprint should expect a hefty fine from the Federal Communications Commission for overbilling its customers, say sources with knowledge of the agency's plans.…
Microsoft's Azure Backup cloud service could start getting a lot more traffic soon, with the introduction of backup services for Windows client operating systems.…
DOCSIS 3.1, a standard designed to deliver downloads at up to 10Gbps on existing hybrid fibre-coax cable television networks, has passed an interoperability test.…
Canonical's "snappy" new formulation of Ubuntu has gained the support of another major public cloud vendor, with Google making the lightweight Linux available for customers of its Compute Engine IaaS offering.…
Jewellery firm Galatea has released an app which plays audio when one of the company's pearls is touched to the back of a phone. That's not a euphemism.…
Microsoft has decided to release the code for “Project Orleans”, code the company uses to power “the basis of the Halo 4 services architecture.”…
Microsoft has drummed up an impressive amount of support for its campaign to fight off the American government – which is demanding access to the US giant's servers in Ireland.…
Microsoft has drummed up an impressive amount of support for its campaign to fight off the American government – which is demanding access to the US giant's servers in Ireland.…
BT has announced its intention to acquire EE for £12.5bn. The telecoms giant had previously been in talks with Telefonica.…
Budget ISP TalkTalk has been accused of forcing customers to remain opted into a so-called Error Replacement Service that swaps NXDomain DNS results with an IP address.…
A new generation of smaller, faster Apple processors is now under production by Samsung, including at Sammy's Texan facility, according to reports.…
Vodafone is poised to do an MVNO deal with T-Mobile US to get back into the US market.…
Facebook engineers have apparently began building a virtual assistant that might one day warn inebriated netizens against uploading embarrassing photos on the free-content ads platform.…
Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi is operating on the thinnest of margins to keep its handset prices low, according to a filing with the Shenzhen Stock Exchange.…
This article was produced in association with JAMF Software …
France's space agency, the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES), will team with Google to advance the Project Loon broadband balloons project.…
NBN Co has signed definitive agreements to acquire Telstra's copper network, plus the hybrid fibre-coax networks belonging to both Telstra and Optus, but just what the deals will deliver is uncertain after communications minister Malcolm Turnbull and NBN Co issued conflicting advice on the speeds the network will deliver.…
UK businesses that rely on a third party pricing system on Amazon were hit by an hour-long software glitch on Friday night, with items being sold for just 1p.…
Facebook has ended a search deal it had in place with Microsoft's Bing.…
Good news, hayseeds: the FCC has ruled that rural broadband should be held to the same standard as that of connections in built-up cities and towns.…
Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg said his social network is “considering” the addition of a "dislike" button.…
More security woes plagued users of the Docker application containerization tech for Linux this week, after an earlier security patch was found to have introduced a brand-new critical vulnerability in the software.…
Brits who have their mobes stolen are still facing shock bills, despite government promises that charges would be capped in a similar way to stolen credit cards.…
BT Infinity users have been suffering with outages and slow service for three days, as the network struggles with a DNS or routing issue.…
Three or four market players is plenty, at least according to the GSMA, the association that represents nearly 800 mobile operators.…
The Tor project has revealed that one of its team has been subjected to “a sustained campaign of harassment for the past several months” and declared it will no longer tolerate such activity on the Tor network.…
After six years in the dark, Europe’s telecoms providers see a light at the end of the tunnel. According to a new report commissioned by industry body ETNO, the sector should return to growth in 2016.…
Vodafone has done a deal with poster giant JCDecaux to use posters sites and street furniture as sites for small cells.…
Plans to create a new internet governance body have grown increasingly desperate … and confusing.…
This article was produced in association with Jamf Software …
Watchdogs in Canada are investigating Apple over concerns the iPhone giant violated antitrust laws in its dealings with Canadian telcos.…
Smaller businesses tend to be worse off for broadband connections than average users, particularly in urban areas, according to an official report on the UK's digital infrastructure.…
Open source platform-as-a-service effort Cloud Foundry now has its very own not-for-profit foundation.…
Computer boffins at Leicester University are concerned that the countryside is feeling left out, so they are investigating ways to include nature in the booming world of technology.…
Google+ will expand the range of options it offers when it asks users to identify their gender.…
The Vertigan panel's report on telecoms regulation in Australia was delivered in October and was mostly ignored by the nation's federal government, but the document has provided a fig-leaf for the abandonment of last year's pre-election promise* to complete the network (albeit with different technologies).…
You now have the option to attach up to 10 custom metadata key-value pairs to your Elastic Transcoder jobs. This metadata will be included in the job notifications and when reading the job via the API or console. This custom metadata helps map your jobs to identifiers used by your internal CMS, so you can manage jobs or efficiently resume workflows upon a transcoding job completion. To learn more, please see our documentation.
More than 60 technology companies, from Cisco to Intel and IBM, have asked the FCC not to tighten the rules on what ISPs can't do with web traffic and subscribers' bills.…
Having sold his company Coppergate to Sigma Designs in 2009 for around $190m, Sckipio boss David (Dudi) Baum has got the band together to build a fixed broadband chip to take advantage of the 1Gbps-over-copper VDSL successor G.fast, which was ratified as an ITU standard this week.…
IBM has claimed a patent for “Routing Service Requests Based on Lowest Actual Cost within a Federated Virtual Service Cloud” that it says “automatically pools cloud computing resources from disparate cloud centers, enabling clients to improve performance and save money by reducing the amount of manual intervention needed to allocate hardware, software and services.”…
The world of 5G remains confusing – even to the carriers who we've been told are demanding the new standard as quickly as possible, it seems.…
Apologies if you're tired of the word “disruption”, but please tolerate it just one more time because Amazon Web Services has just done something mighty disruptive: allowed its OpsWork control-freak-as-a-service to wrangle on-premises servers.…
A mother and daughter are suing Comcast after finding out the cable giant's router in their home was offering public Wi-Fi without their permission.…
BT successfully convinced Britain's advertising watchdog to admonish rival ISP Virgin Media for "misleading" its customers with unsubstantiated savings claims.…
Reports are emerging that the builder of Australia's national broadband network, NBN Co, has all-but struck a deal with Telstra over access to last-mile copper, plus a separate arrangement to absorb the country's cable broadband networks. The deals are reportedly so advanced they'll be tabled at a cabinet meeting, perhaps even today's last such meeting for the calendar year.…
At its Cloud for Government Summit in Washington DC on Tuesday, Microsoft declared its cloud good enough for government work, announcing general availability of Microsoft Azure Government.…
To support the growing number of Earth science researchers on AWS, we are adding two new members to the collection of Public Data Sets on AWS: CGIAR Global Circulation Models (GCM) data and imagery from the Landsat 8 satellite.
We are working with CGIAR (a consortium of international agricultural research centers) to make their data more accessible and more easily available, with the expectation that it will lead to innovative ways to address critical food security and development challenges. The GCM data comes from the CCAFS Climate Portal and is available at s3://cgiardata. Please visit the Public Data Set catalog page for more information.
In support of the White House's Climate Data Initiative, we have committed to make up to a petabyte of Landsat earth imagery data from the USGS widely available as an AWS Public Data Set. By making Landsat data readily available near our flexible computing resources, we hope to accelerate innovation in climate research, humanitarian relief, and disaster preparedness efforts around the world. If would like to be notified when this data becomes available, please go here and fill out the form.
For more information on these initiatives, please read the blog.
You can now use AWS OpsWorks with existing EC2 instances and on-premises servers. OpsWorks is a service that helps you automate operational tasks like code deployment, software configurations, package installations, database setups, and server scaling using Chef. OpsWorks gives you the flexibility to define your application architecture and resource configuration and handles the provisioning and management of your AWS resources for you. Click here to learn more about OpsWorks.
Previously, you could only deploy and operate applications on EC2 instances created by OpsWorks. Now, you can use OpsWorks to deploy, manage, and scale your application on any server such as existing EC2 instances or servers running in your own data center (your servers will need to be able to connect to AWS public endpoints).
OpsWorks costs $0.02 per hour for each on-premises server on which you install the agent, and it is available at no additional charge for EC2 instances. Click here to learn more about our pricing.
You can learn more about this new feature by visiting our blog.
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fast, reliable, scalable, fully managed message queuing service. You can use SQS to transmit any volume of data, at any level of throughput, without losing messages or requiring other services to be always available.
You can now delete all messages in an SQS queue using the new PurgeQueue action. When you purge a queue, all the messages previously sent to the queue will be deleted. Since your queue and its attributes will remain, there is no need to reconfigure the queue to continue using it.
For example, if you are developing an application, you can make changes to the message format without replacing the queue. When debugging an application, you can clear the queue to remove potentially erroneous messages. If you are testing your application, you can drive a high message volume through it and then purge it to start fresh before entering production.
To purge a queue, log in to the AWS Management Console and choose Amazon SQS. Then, select a queue, and choose “Purge Queue” from the Queue Actions menu. The queue will then be cleared of all messages. You can also purge queues using the AWS SDKs or command-line tools.
The message deletion process takes up to 60 seconds; messages sent to the queue during this time may be deleted. If you only need to delete specific messages, you can use the DeleteMessage or DeleteMessageBatch actions. To learn more about Amazon SQS, visit: http://ift.tt/wwG7QJ
A European human rights watchdog says companies are being pressured into acting as the internet’s unofficial cops.…
The Internet of Things is becoming the Standards Wars of Things: Intel has now thrown its hat into the ring with its own IoT Platform to connect stuff end-to-end.…
Most Brits can get broadband at home these days, according to regulator Ofcom, but the service is still pretty patchy.…
There are no plans for a takeover at Blackberry, says John Chen, CEO of the mobile firm, who recently took to LinkedIn to explain his Kim Kardashian-free global strategy. And it’s sensible, all about business and not about glitz.…
A new service piggybacks a company number on the back of the employee's personal number to save money for both and make Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) easier.…
A "ghost ship" which helped develop the world's network of undersea cables - and worked for the former British Cable & Wireless firm, nowadays renowned as partner to the Five-Eyes spook alliance under the secret codename GERONTIC - has been discovered deep beneath the waves near Hawaii.…
Mobile carrier club the GSMA has hit back against the latest round of Snowden claims, saying it can't find any evidence of “active targeting or compromise of GSMA systems, communications and stored documentation”.…
Google has announced that Microsoft users can now deploy their licenses in its cloud.…
Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon chief Jeff Bezos and Apple kingpin Tim Cook recently welcomed China's top internet regulator to the US.…
Lots of Australian businesses have already jumped aboard Microsoft's cloudwagon, often after having been told that the latency associated with data centres on foreign soil was no impediment to anything at all.…
The long-awaited G.fast physical layer standard has been signed off by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), improving the chance that the world will see standards-compliant, interoperable kit start to ship in 2015.…
An unknown number of Virgin Media customers are once again complaining about YouTube buffering glitches with the cable network.…
Amazon Web Services has gouged prices of 46 services since its launch in 2006, but not one was in retaliation to rivals (no way, not one), insists UK boss Iain Gavin.…
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has made getting Windows apps everywhere via the cloud a central theme of his tenure at the top and next week the next stage will begin in this process when RemoteApp rolls out as a commercial service.…
In a further blow to efforts by domain-names overlord ICANN to create a body to steer the future of the internet, the NetMundial Initiative has now been snubbed by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB).…
The NSA, and its British counterpart GCHQ, spied on innocent telco employees and standards bodies to tap into mobile phone networks worldwide, according to the latest leak from the Edward Snowden archive.…
Orange’s plans to take over Jazztel in Spain could hit a wall as the European Commission begin an investigation to determine if the merger is in line with EU competition law.…
Cloud-based backup, recovery and disaster recovery (DR) services are being offered from an Iron Mountain data dungeon using Seagate kit and EVault software.…
A number of Virgin Media broadband customers have been cut off due to a firmware update cock-up, The Register can reveal.…
BYOD (bring your own device) has its ups and its downs but it is becoming more and more popular and those of us in IT management need to learn to live with it.…
If EE was being its normal hype-filled self, it would call its latest mobile trial in Cumbria 5G. Its restraint is admirable – and the technology even more so.…
Google has announced that it's obtained Payment Card Industry (PCI) certification for its cloud platform, chasing Microsoft and Amazon into the cloudy payment space.…
Twitter is tweeting about how much easier it'll be for tweeters to report abusive twits. Stick that in your 140 characters.…
An FCC commissioner has asked Netflix to explain a contradiction in its demand for net neutrality: on the one hand, Netflix wants an open and neutral internet for all – and on the other hand, it's making deals with ISPs to speed up its video streams.…
It might be a cunning plan. Culture minister Sajid Javid’s really stupid idea of national roaming seems to have got the mobile phone networks to pull their fingers out about "not spots".…
The US government's role at the top of the internet should be replaced by four different groups, according to an official proposal put out for public comment.…
SEA-ME-WE 3 is a marvel: the 39,000km submarine cable connects 31 nations, has 39 landing stations and stretches from Germany to Japan. Its two fibre pairs each carry 480 Gbits/s, a decent slice of the world's data traffic.…
Amid the growing number of demands by netizens for Google to remove their out-of-date information under the controversial "right to be forgotten" ruling, it seems other search engines are keen to remind us not to forget them, too.…
Samsung has surprisingly opted to hang onto its current head of mobile JK Shin, despite rumours that he was for the chop after the mobile division underperformed all year.…
A group of North Korean journalists will visit the UK next year to "observe how multimedia websites work at British media companies".…
Working on the move has become most people's normal way of operating. We are used to having our world in our pocket and being able to read and write emails, produce simple documents and generally stay in the corporate loop whether we are in the office, in the pub, on a train or (sadly) sitting on a beach trying to be on holiday.…
The European Space Agency (ESA) and Airbus Defence say they has successfully sent data between satellites, using lasers, in a proof-of-concept demonstration of what both call the “SpaceDataHighway”.…
NBN Co has reconfirmed what's been known ever since the 2013 election: fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) builds are more-or-less frozen, and all new builds will be under its multi-technology model.…
Sony Pictures has reportedly begun investigating possible hacking links to North Korea, following a savage attack on its network earlier this week.…
Oracle's website tumbled from the interwebs in the last hour but the cause of the outage remains unclear.…
Mobile giant Vodafone has reportedly been mulling over a number of takeover plans, including the possibility of scooping up cable company Liberty Global – Virgin Media's owner.…
An unknown number of TalkTalk customers have been locked out of their email accounts for days, but the budget ISP warned this morning that its service was still struggling to return to normal.…
If you're a member of the backroom staff at a big company, you probably spend a lot of time sitting at a desk bashing at a computer. Indeed, in my day job as IT ops manager for a telco I'm delighted to have probably the only truly comfy chair on the premises and my huge desktop screen for the Excel-wrangling that forms part of what I do.…
The sceptred isle of old Blighty is in flames today as greed crazed mobs, both online and in the real world, stormed bricks'n'mortar shops and etail websites alike leaving blood on the linoleum and smoke belching from overstressed data centres – hosting Currys, Tesco and other box-flingers – up and down the land.…
Venerable hosting firm Webfusion UK is experiencing a crippling outage which has hobbled web services across the country.…
Ever wondered who tried to steal your meerkat? Well, worry no longer thanks to the London Zoo, Google and CCTV biz KineSense.…
The Global Commission on Internet Governance (GCIG) has waded into the debate over the critical IANA contract with a formal statement and position paper. Rather than making a splash, however, the result is somewhat of a soggy mess.…
Don't start your Black Friday online shopping spree just yet: Amazon Web Services' CloudFront content delivery network has wobbled over the last few hours and the perennially-loss-making retailer, and customers of its cloud computing services, have reportedly been hard to access.…
Australia's Communications minister Malcolm Turnbull on Monday labelled those who oppose use of the public cloud “box-huggers” and suggested such behaviour is bad because it ties organisations to an outmoded and expensive way of doing IT.…
UK readers, what you've always suspected has been proven true – even the weakest mobile networks abroad perform better than our second-best, according to German mobile network survey company P3, which has published solid numbers on mobile network coverage.…
BT's patent spat with US company ASSIA will start to be noticed by customers, with the carrier reportedly shutting down boxes that provide rate adaptation after it lost a crucial round of legal action.…
Austrian Facebook-botherer-in-chief Max Schrems says the US social network appears to be saying its users are either too young or too insane to file a class-action lawsuit against it.…
Google has turned on its namesake top-level domain (TLD) with the creation of 'nic.google' representing the internet giant's entry into the domain name market.…
NBN Co has followed through on its promise to cut the price of its services with a 12.5 per cent snip off the price of its connectivity virtual circuit (CVC) as of 1 February 2015.…
The European Commission was perfectly entitled to conduct dawn raids against Orange, according to the EU General Court.…
An anonymous South Londoner has been named as the winner of a pseudo lottery designed to (hopefully) make one Reddit user a millionaire.…
Former EU digital tzar Neelie Kroes’ net neutrality plans for the Continent may be chucked out by national governments.…
T-Mobile USA has agreed to stop twiddling with subscribers' mobile broadband speeds to hide the fact they were being capped.…
Plans for a new internet governance body are struggling to get off the ground after blowback from the internet community itself.…
Telstra has again demonstrated technology that will let lucky LTE users consume the entire 15 GB of its largest consumer post-paid broadband plan in less than 5 minutes.…
US watchdog the FCC has raised at least US$36bn by auctioning off a load of radio frequencies for improving wireless broadband. That's more than three times the $10.1bn it expected.…
Blighty's broadband providers are once again at Ofcom to do something about the alleged monopoly they believe former national telco BT maintains in the business broadband sector.…
BT could be the new owner of Blighty mobe network O2 if talks with Spanish parent Telefonica go well.…
Our own Tim Phillips is joined by Paul Gregory, from QA, to deliver a live hands-on session on Azure Active Directory tomorrow at 11am. It’s your chance to learn from the experts and get answers to any questions you might have.…
Ericsson and IBM have announced a collaboration to jointly research phased-array antenna designs for 5G, which might prove interesting as nothing has yet been agreed on what 5G might involve.…
About 10 years ago, Faultline wrote a report on the economics of quad play. We hardly sold any (about 20), and the reason was, one of our resellers told us, was that “quad play” was old hat.…
Last July, Dimension Data's Australian cloud went down for over 24 hours. Now the company says its assessment of the incident found those who suffered the most had themselves to blame, to a degree.…
An estimated 86 per cent of WordPress websites harbour a dangerous cross-site scripting (XSS) hole in the popular comment system plugin, in what researcher Jouk Pynnonen calls the most serious flaw in five years. The bug could provide a pathway for attacking visitors' machines.…
Dimension Data has announced it will soon offer a government-only cloud hosted in Australia's capital city, Canberra.…
IP address-matching powers for police and spooks are to be pushed through Parliament with the blessing of the junior member of the UK's Coalition government, after the Liberal Democrats claimed today that the Snoopers' Charter was "dead".…
Back in the old days providing your employees with corporate computer equipment was an expensive business. When I was 19 I was the university holidays PC guy in an office full of RPG III developers; the fact that they thought their System/38 with its 5250 terminals was a pretty neat piece of kit was the only reason they didn't envy the spanking new IBM PS/2 Model 80 under my desk.…
Britain's non-emergency telephone numbers for the police (101) and the NHS (111) have collapsed nationwide.…
Yahoo! has apologised to customers who have been unable to access their email accounts since Thursday, after an underwater fibre cable was mistakenly severed.…
Yahoo! has apologised to customers who have been unable to access their email accounts since Thursday, after an underwater fibre cable was mistakenly severed.…
Z.com has been sold for $6.8m (£4.3m, 800m yen) to Japanese domain biz GMO Registry, putting it in the top ten of all-time domain name sales.…
