Judge Richard Posner of Chicago has ended the Apple-versus-Motorola legal battle, at least in America: not only has he dismissed the case, he has done so “with prejudice”, meaning the two companies can’t try to defibrillate the lawsuit with a new filing.…
One of the problems with trying to improve things is that not everyone appreciates it.…
The ITU has finalized its proposals for rewriting the regulations governing internet traffic, which will be decided at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WC-IT) being held in Dubai this December.…
Rumors that the iPhone's familiar 30-pin connector will be replaced in the iPhone 5 with a Micro-USB port have riled the fanbois universe, inciting charges of planned obsolecense and worse. New reports, however, point not to a standard Micro-USB port, but a new – and proprietary – Apple port.…
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has confirmed that it will have new CEO to replace outgoing boss Rod Beckstrom, but not until October.…
If you charge your fully depleted iPad every other day, it'll cost you a buck thirty-six per year, according to a just-released study by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) of Palo Alto, California.…
This week we learn how robots have been given human-like fingers, how eating less meat could help the climate, Microsoft's plans to challenge the iPad with Surface, we mark Alan Turing's centenary and discuss the rest of the week in Wired news
By: Nate Lanxon,
Google has accidentally revealed that the next update to the Android operating system will be nicknamed "Jelly Bean".
Since Android version 1.5, Google has given each update of the OS a dessert-themed name, starting with each successive letter of the alphabet. Examples include Cupcake, Donut, Eclair and, the most recent release, Ice Cream Sandwich.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Facebook is expected to cough up around $20m, and amend certain features of the site, to end litigation brought against the dominant social network following the arrival of its much-disliked "sponsored stories" feature.…
Kickstarter has launched a page to show off the statistics of projects on its site. So we now know that less than half of all Kickstarter projects manage to pull in their funding target. While fashion projects often fail, dance-related pitches are largely successful.
If you've never used Kickstarter, it's a site where smart people like inventors, designers and movie-makers can pitch an idea and then ask the community to chip in a few dollars to help bring that product to life.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Tractor beams -- which allow spaceships to pick up and shift objects without physically touching them -- have long been a staple of science fiction.
Previous attempts to build them have relied on inducing electric or magnetic charges, using heat to create air pressure differences, and even attempting to manipulate gravity. However, a physicist has proposed and intriguing new possibility -- one that uses nothing but light.
By: Ian Steadman, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Nintendo has announced a super-sized version of its 3DS handheld, which it calls the 3DS XL.
The console has 4.88-inch top screen (compared to the 3.58-inch screen on the 3DS), and a 4.18-inch bottom display (previously 3.02-inches). To accommodate, the console is 155 mm wide to the 3DS's 134 mm, and is a fair bit heavier to hold, too.
By: Mark Brown,
Google is being sued by the Texas Attorney General's office in the US, because - it has been alleged - the search giant "withheld" documents from a competition investigation of the company.…
Neo-Nazis operating in the UK have reportedly used YouTube's advertising revenue-sharing system to gobble up payments from companies that include BT, O2 and Virgin Media.…
Yahoo! and Facebook have asked a US court for more time to prepare their filings because their lawyers think that may help them to reach a settlement.…
Mobile industry body the GSMA reckons it has come up with a plan which should help international business travellers avoid bill shock and better understand their data usage.…
FCC chairman Julius Genachowski has issued a public statement of support after a senior Congressional committee unanimously approved a resolution condemning moves to bring the internet under new management.…
The Sydney-based team that gave the world Google Maps has released a new product, “Google Maps Coordinate”, which offers field force management through a web app and Android.…
The "Apple 4G deception" imbroglio in Australia has concluded with the company slapped with a $AU2.5 million dollar fine for advertising capabilities it couldn’t deliver down under.…
The Finnish Prime Minister Jyrki Katainen has ruled out any government rescue package for ailing Nokia, saying the company is on its own.…
For fans of electronic music, something very exciting has happened -- the BBC has reopened the Radiophonic Workshop.
The Radiophonic Workshop was founded at the BBC in 1958 at their Maida Vale studio as an in-house sound effects and music production team. Within a few short years they had become responsible for some of the most groundbreaking work in the then-new field of electronic music.
By: Ian Steadman, Edited by: Duncan Geere
On the longest day of the year, spare a thought for the Brits experiencing the shortest, darkest day of the year -- those overwintering in Antarctic research bases.
The BBC World Service has broadcast a special programme to the scientists and technical and support staff who keep the bases running during the southern winter, while we're getting out the barbecues in Britain. Once a year, on 21 June, staff at the four bases will crowd around their shortwave radios to listen to music requests and messages sent by their families back home.
By: Duncan Geere, Edited by: Olivia Solon
We're celebrating the life, work and legacy of mathematician Alan Turing this week on Wired.co.uk, and part of that legacy is inspiring people to work in cryptography and codebreaking -- so we've partnered with the Cyber Security Challenge UK to set you a challenge.
Turing's career spanned both science and technology, but it was his work in deciphering the German Enigma code that Churchill called the single biggest contribution to Allied victory in the Second World War.
By: Wired.co.uk Staff,
BT is struggling to get its broadband service up and running in parts of the capital and across the southeast of England this afternoon, after the telecoms giant was hit by a massive outage.…
After our inaugural event in 2011, Wired 2012 returns in October as a two-day conference celebrating the ideas, innovations and people reshaping our world.
We can officially announce that the first round of speakers at Wired 2012 -- organised in association with Telefónica -- will include: Troy Carter, manager of Lady Gaga and Founder and CEO of Atom Factory; David Karp, founder and CEO of Tumblr; Lily Cole, model, actress and sustainability champion; Ajaz Ahmed, founder of digital agency AKQA; digital marketer Stefan Olander, who is responsible for many of Nike's innovative campaigns; Mona Eltahawy, an award-winnign columnist covering Arab and Muslim issues; designer and architect Thomas Heatherwick; former head chef of El Bulli Ferran Adrià ; artist Alexa Meade; Cambridge professor of developmental psychopathology Simon Baron-Cohen and Maria Popova, editor of Brain Pickings.
By: Wired.co.uk Staff,
The European Parliament's International Trade committee (Inta) has voted to reject the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (Acta), by 19 votes to 12. It's a key decision, because this committee strongly influences the wider parliament.
Acta is, as we explained in our guide, an "international agreement that aims to create international standards on intellectual property rights enforcement."
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Nasa astronomers believe that a crater located on the Moon's south pole is laced with ice, based on surprising data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft.
Shackleton crater is more than three kilometres deep and about 20 kilometres wide. Due to the meagre tilt of the lunar spin axis, the interior of this south pole crater is permanently dark and extremely cold.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Two founders of notorious BitTorrent search website, The Pirate Bay, are bidding to get an earlier Swedish court verdict overturned at the European Court of Human Rights.…
The Met Police is rumoured to be planning to use unmanned surveillance drones to patrol the skies during the Olympics, but one expert is warning that these vehicles present a huge public safety risk.
Robert Dewar is the CEO of AdaCore, which provides secure software for commercial aviation, defence, and rail companies, giving him something of a vested interest in the topic. However's he's also an emeritus professor of computer science at New York University. He believes that the lack of certification in the software of unmanned aerial vehicles is a major problem that needs to be addressed, particularly if we plan to introduce them to our cities.
By: Olivia Solon, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Two researchers in the Netherlands helmed the construction of a LEGO Turing machine, a quirky manifestation of the classic computer science concept first devised by Alan Turing in 1936.
The device, built by Jereon van den Bos and Davy Landman using a single LEGO Mindstorms NXT set, is one of the most impressive - and simple -- attempts we've seen at building a physical Turing machine.
By: Geeta Dayal, Edited by: Ian Steadman
An international team of geographers and conservationists has developed a system to monitor deforestation across Latin America in near real-time using satellite data.
Although Brazil has had a near real-time monitoring system in place since 2008, this is the first time an equivalent has been developed for the rest of Latin America. The launch of the system, called Terra-I, coincides with the Rio+20 conference on the environment.
It works by monitoring changes to land cover every 16 days for every 250 metres on the ground, with a view to help national governments, conservationists and those implementing climate-related policy to assess trends in deforestation.
By: Olivia Solon, Edited by: Duncan Geere
BT is the UK's final major internet service provider to block The Pirate Bay, following a high court order for ISPs censor the torrent site.
In April 2012, the British High Court forced six major providers to block access to the website. Firm like Sky and Everything Everywhere all had to stop their users from accessing the infamous file-sharing hub.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Chinese government-owned search engine Jike took another step towards competing with the big boys, Baidu and Google, a year after its launch by announcing advertising on the site.…
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has again taken a local telco to task for dodgy advertising practices.…
NBN Co, the company building Australia’s National Broadband Network, will revisit the rules and pricing for access to its network in response to feedback from access seekers.…
Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Pegatron has been awarded the contract to build Microsoft's Surface tablet, and sources suggest Redmond's got a twin strategy for tablets.…
Samsung's highly anticipated Android-based Galaxy S III smartphone may be basking in attention that it's receiving during its official launch on Wednesday, but there's at least one top tech exec who's snubbing it.…
Microsoft held its developer preview of the Windows Phone 8 operating system on Wednesday, and revealed that it is shifting the platform to share core kernel features with Windows 8 for better integration.…
A team at the University of Exeter has presented a report showing that one simple dietary change could significantly lower global carbon dioxide levels.
Getting westerners to eat half as much meat than they currently do would lower the average worldwide meat consumption from 16.6 percent to 15 percent of total daily calorie intake. That would mean that even taking into account the global population increase to 9.3 billion by 2050, less farmland would be needed for livestock and so more could be used for growing biofuels.
By: Duncan Geere, Edited by: Olivia Solon
BBC's iPlayer team has added a handy new button to its live video player. Jump into a show halfway through, and you'll be given an option to restart the programme from the very beginning.
The "Live Restart" feature, which will be present on iPlayer and on Connected TVs, also allows audiences to rewind live TV.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Adobe's second quarter net income eased on poor European demand as well as its move to take Creative Suite into the cloud.…
A team of exometeorologists at MIT have calculated the size of the snowflakes that fall onto the polar regions of Mars in its winter, and it turns out that they're pretty tiny.
Mars' weak atmosphere is comprised almost entirely of carbon dioxide, and during the chilly -87C winters on the red planet, it gets cold enough for particles of snow to form. Except that it's not snow as we know it, which is made of water crystals. Instead, it's dry ice -- frozen crystals of carbon dioxide.
By: Duncan Geere, Edited by: Olivia Solon
Sales of smartphone accessories will generate a staggering $20bn (£13bn) this year, a figure set to rise to $38bn (£24bn) by 2017.…
You read it here first, courtesy of our top Shoreditch-'til-I-die columnist Steve Bong: Tory chick-lit MP Louise Mensch - a serial user of Twitter - has now launched her own chatroom-cum-microblogging service.…
As part of Turing Week, Wired.co.uk travelled to Microsoft's campus in Redmond and met with Rick Rashid, chief research officer at Microsoft Research. Rashid was employee number one at Microsoft Research after joining in 1991, and now oversees worldwide operations for the division, which encompasses R&D facilities across the globe.
Rashid was previously a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and has published scientific papers in the fields of computer vision, operating systems, network protocols and communications security. He is a member of the National Science Foundation Computer Directorate Advisory Committee and is a Trustee for the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology.
Wired.co.uk spoke to Rashid to find out his thoughts on Turing's contributions to fields Microsoft Research is invested in, as well as whether passing the Turing test is still a goal we should be focussed on achieving.
By: Nate Lanxon, Edited by: Olivia Solon
Applied physicists at Aalto University in Finland have developed optical displays that use only air and water to present information.
The team drew inspiration from the lotus leaf's uncanny ability to repel water. So hydrophobic are the leaves that water droplets simply roll off the surface, leaving them clean from dirt. The leaves' water-repelling ability comes from a thin layer of air trapped by the nanostructure of the surface which the water slides over.
By: Olivia Solon, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Amazon Web Services has added an Australian edge location, as foreshadowed* by The Register last week.…
A New York costume designer and a Russian spacesuit engineer have turned to Kickstarter to help fund a budget astronaut outfit for the burgeoning commercial space industry.
The suits are designed for Intra Vehicular Activity -- essentially a safety backup in case of an emergency loss of cabin pressure. The pair says that commercial space firms like SpaceX and Boeing will need these suits to ensure the basic safety of manned flights.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
BT has glued shut conventional access to The Pirate Bay in the UK, which means all the major ISPs in Blighty have now complied with a High Court judge's order to block thepiratebay.se from their networks.…
BT has glued shut conventional access to The Pirate Bay in the UK, which means all the major ISPs in Blighty have now complied with a High Court judge's order to block thepiratebay.se from their networks.…
Holo-disc start-up hVault, which slurped the blueprints for InPhase Technologies' holographic storage technology, has vowed to breathe life into the technology, with product promised for next year. Of course, we've already passed the spring of 2012, when hVault originally said it would be shipping the kit.…
UK law makers and the judiciary should take note of new research that has claimed that a narrow reading of copyright law exceptions can result in an erosion of investment in new technologies, an expert has said.…
All-flash array startup Solidfire has doubled the capacity of its array but left performance untouched.…
Thirty-four per cent of Chinese flyers have booked a ticket on a mobile phone in the last year, compared to 6 per cent globally, but that's ramping up as customers expect to manage all their transactions on the move.…
Tech-mad Hong Kong and Singapore have the highest percentage of tablet and smartphone users in the world, according to a sweeping new global study from telcoms equipment vendor Ericsson.…
Australia will reap its Digital Dividend in April 2013, after Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy, that month as the time when a spectrum auction will be conducted.…
So you have decided that private cloud is the way to go. You have calculated the capacity requirements, done the architectural design, decided whether any equipment and software can be repurposed.…
The UK's controversial Tory MP Louise Mensch has a launched her own social network, called Menshn. It aims to be a more on-topic Twitter, where users are encouraged to post micro-messages about specific talking points.
Right now, the (currently) US-only website is focused on politics. There are three topics to talk about: a catch-all chat room for talk on the US elections, and then areas to gab about the campaigns of presidential hopeful Mitt Romney and the current president, Barack Obama.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Google has denied that it tried to cover up certain aspects of its Street View data slurp as the UK Information Commissioner's Office reopens its investigation into the incident.…
Google has gotten its hands on the GIS data for all of the UK's waterway paths for its Maps without handing over a penny.…
Domain name policy manager ICANN is set to be left with a vacant CEO's office for two or three months, according to sources close to the organisation.…
Microsoft has shed light on its next Windows Phone 'Tango' update, which will see the smartphone OS gain the ability to import and export contacts to and from the Sim card, and attach multiple files to a single message.…
Are you human or a machine? Prove it, by passing the Turing Test -- a test of the ability of a machine to exhibit intelligent behaviour.
In Alan Turing's 1950 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, the mathematician posed the question: "Can machines think?" But almost immediately he dismissed that question as too "meaningless" to be worthy of discussion, and swapped it for the much-more specific: "Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?"
By: Duncan Geere, Edited by: Olivia Solon
Roboticists from the University of Southern California have created a robotic finger that can identify materials just by touching them -- and it can do it better than a human.
The robotic finger's design mimics a real human pinky. So it's got a soft, flexible skin with a fingerprint-like surface, which is wrapped over a liquid filling.
By: Mark Brown,
ARM is doubling the punch of its Mali 400 graphics processors with extra cores for tablet, phone and TV makers that are not ready for combined graphics and compute chips.…
Firefox-creator Mozilla has shown off a prototype web browser for the iPad, called Junior. It's free from tabs, almost entirely clear of a user interface and is an antidote, according to product designer Alex Limi, to the "miserable experience" of using Safari.
Referring to the default browser on iPad, Limi says, "it's still the best browsing experience on a tablet but it's still kinda sucky. It's not fun, it feels like work. It feels like the one application where [Apple] took the desktop version, pulled out the UI and slapped it onto the iPad."
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
By: Sol Neelman, Edited by: Ian Steadman
Wireless charging was a key feature of Samsung's flagship Android blower when it was announced, but the replacement back plate it needs isn't on the shelves yet, so one brave soul has hacked a Palm Touchstone charger into the S3 case.…
In a cascade of acronyms Ofcom has proposed price caps on high-speed leased-line connections: but only outside London where competition is having a hard time getting a foothold.…
In one of its most hyped-up announcements of recent years, Microsoft has entered the tablet market with the Surface, a 10.6 inch table running Windows 8 on Intel and ARM platforms.…
Both Intel and Google started the week in acquisitive modes, with the former announcing a massive $375m patent deal with InterDigital, and the latter acquiring over 50 patents from Magnolia Broadband for an unspecified amount.…
How do you make a 300 horsepower racing car go at 320 kph? British car designer Ben Bowlby briefly answered that with the experimental DeltaWing racing car, which competed at the "24 Hours of Le Mans" endurance race until it was cruelly denied a race finish -- not from mechanical failure, but due to a race incident.
The 24 Hours of Le Mans race challenges teams to build cars that are capable of sustained, high-performance racing, but for the Highcroft Racing Nissan-powered DeltaWing, the challenge was more about proving a design concept to a sceptical motor-racing world.
By: Ben Pendrey, Edited by: Duncan Geere
In Alan Turing's 42 years of life, his discoveries and inventions saved thousands of lives and paved the way for modern computing. Despite this, it has been only recently that he has been recognised for his achievements. Turing was eccentric to say the least, with a scruffy appearance and stammering speech. Turing's mother would have to write to him to remind him to buy "at least one suit a year". This did not stop him from holding up his trousers with string and wearing a pyjama top under his coat. In Hut 8, where he conducted most of his codebreaking at Bletchley, Turing would attach his tea mug to the radiator using a combination lock. During hay fever season, it wasn't uncommon to see Turing ride his bicycle to work wearing his government-issued gas mask.
Beyond his eccentricities, Turing was a brilliant academic and he was credited by Winston Churchill as having made the single biggest contribution to Allied victory in the war against Nazi Germany. Wired.co.uk has created a simple timeline of his achievements.
By: Olivia Solon, Edited by: Nate Lanxon
Social networks, 24-hour news, consumer journalism and the ability to share everything with everyone (and anything with anyone), has created an insatiable desire for gossip and scandal. Throughout the Leveson enquiry we've witnessed countless hidden secrets unearthed and pored over by lawyers, media and the public. In short, nothing is really secret any more. Alas, it wasn't always thus.
During the Second World War, the manor at Bletchley Park -- once a paragon of British architectural eccentricity (to put it kindly) -- was home to not only the greatest collective secret in the history of warfare, but the greatest example of secrecy being used as an undefeatable weapon.
By: Chris Owen, Edited by: Olivia Solon
Alan Turing was born on 23 June 1912. In his 42 years of life Turing showed himself to be a gifted mathematician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist who is most widely recognised for breaking the German Enigma codes at Bletchley Park during World War II. So significant was his role as a code breaker that Winston Churchill credited him as having made the single biggest contribution to Allied victory against Nazi Germany.
In addition to cracking the Enigma during the War, Turing also made significant inroads in modern computer science, designing the ACE computer and then software for Mark I at Manchester University. When Turing started his academic career in Cambridge in the 1930, the word "computer" was used to refer to a human working to solve scientific and technical problems using mechanical calculating devices. However, Turing wrote a paper setting the basis for a machine capable of solving many problems that could be expressed algorithmically, thus paving the way for the modern computer.
By: Olivia Solon, Edited by: Nate Lanxon
Canada asked Google to remove a video of a Canadian flushing his passport down the toilet and the US police wanted a blog that defamed a cop in a "personal capacity" taken down.…
UK defence corporation BAE Systems is preparing to run the first unmanned flight through UK civil airspace, to demonstrate that UAVs could be safely flown over Britain.
The firm is using a modified BAE Jetstream 31 (nicknamed "The Flying Test Bed") -- a small twin-turboprop airliner with 18 seats. It will have pilots on-board, but they can take their hands off the controls and hand it over to the racks of computers and control systems in the aircraft's rear.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
A report by the US National Research Council has found that fracking can cause earthquakes, but the controversial process is not a major risk factor for quakes that are actually strong enough for people to feel.
Fracking is a process where highly-pressurised liquid is pumped deep below ground, fracturing great veins in the rocks. Oil and natural gas seeps out, which can then be harvested. It's a contentious process, but it offers the potential to unlock vast quantities of fuel.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Samsung's "Olympic" Galaxy S3 is being posted out to athletes and game officials next week, complete with pay-by-bonk functionality and a customised interface for those who need to know how great Samsung is.…
Troubled cellular disrupter LightSquared has apparently managed to extend its debt burden again, potentially keeping the company afloat until September next year.…
Teen social network site Habbo Hotel is going to allow its users to chat again soon, as its parent company removes the restrictions imposed after allegations of inappropriate sexual content.…
Western economies buffeted by the Great Recession and subsequent Euro-crises can accelerate out of their current fiscal fug if governments invest in a jolting dose of fast broadband, says the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).…
China Telecom has only our best interests at heart, which is why it’s proposing that a Balkanised DNS system would save us from the disastrous effects of failure to scale.…
