The Russian regulator has skipped over all that auction nonsense to award 4G licences to the four network operators, denying licences to three others, but then Russia has had 4G for years.…
Schoolchildren should be given simple radio kits to build so they can learn basic electronics, communications minister Ed Vaizey said yesterday.…
JobVidi is a career management tool that bridges the gap between regular recruitment sites and social networks. Users can search and apply for jobs using a LinkedIn profile, keeping control over who sees any sensitive information. JobVidi -- currently in beta -- guarantees a response to any job that users apply for using their site. Those not actively looking for a job can also find out their value and marketability in other sectors. Wired.co.uk talks to founder James Brookner.
By: Guest Author, Edited by: Olivia Solon
The BBC is considering a bid for control of the Local TV multiplex, putting the national broadcaster in line for £25m from the pockets of the, er, national broadcaster.…
Religious convictions are emerging as the key battle line in the massive domain name expansion currently in progress at internet addressing overlord ICANN.…
O2's mobile network is struggling to its feet after a 19-hour outage left thousands of customers unable to make or receive calls. This morning 2G should be working again but 3G remains patchy.…
Wired asks the experts what they see happening as technology and travel come together.
By: Madhumita Venkataramanan, Edited by: Ian Steadman
Telstra is shedding its struggling investment in New Zealand, TelstraClear, for $NZ840 million ($AU660 million) to rival Vodafone New Zealand.…
The long-awaited telecommunications consumer protection (TCP) code, designed to push Australian telcos to clean up their terrible track record, has been adopted by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.…
Maybe Yahoo! should have held onto Zimbra instead of selling it off to VMware two and a half years ago. But for the sake of users of the email and collaboration tool that Yahoo paid a stunning $350m to acquire in September 2007, it is probably best that Zimbra ended up inside VMware, which is playing for keeps on the desktop as well as in the data center these days.…
Google is pushing out the Android 4.1 "Jelly Bean" upgrade on Wednesday, but only to customers who have the unlocked version of the Samsung-built Galaxy Nexus mobile.…
Amazon has beefed up gaming on its Android-based Kindle Fire platform, in hopes that adding cloudy goodness will help bolster the device in the upcoming fondleslab wars.…
Amazon has launched a gaming platform for Kindle Fire owners, called GameCircle. It has some similar features to Xbox Live and Apple's Game Center.
It offers achievements, so you can earn little badges for in-game accomplishments. Leaderboards let you compare score with other players -- but it doesn't look like you'll actually be able to compete with specific friends (or adversaries).
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
It's not often that I go to conferences where sessions open with the line "let's talk about sex", but that's precisely what happened when Anneliese Schwenkhagen was introduced to the stage at DLD Women in Munich. Schwenkhagen is a doctor who focuses on hormonal imbalances in women, and she outlined the differences between the male and female approach to sex.
She started by highlighting the fact that in the 1800s, medical professionals believed that menstruation and sexuality had a deleterious effect on the intellect of women. Conditions such as hysteria, nymphomania and moral insanity were thought to be the result of inappropriate reading or even playing music. The physiological cause of these conditions was the clitoris, and masturbation.
By: Olivia Solon, Edited by: Nate Lanxon
Parts of the O2 network have fallen over leaving customers and GiffGaff punters unable to make calls, send texts or surf the web from their phones.…
"If I drew you a cow it would look like a jelly," admits Carl Partridge, the 34-year-old app developer from West Hampstead who is changing the way people use the UK's bus networks.
A lack of artistic skill has not held Partridge back, however. He is responsible for creating the London Bus Checker mobile app, a hugely successful £2 download that provides busy travellers a live countdown on their iPhone as to when the bus they are waiting for will arrive.
Now he's taking this idea to the whole of the United Kingdom with UK Bus Checker -- and he has global plans in his sights, too.
By: Nate Lanxon, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Astronomers say that the Hubble Space Telescope has helped solve a cosmic mystery: why do the ancient dwarf galaxies on the outskirts of the Milky Way contain so few stars?
Our galaxy is surrounded by "ghost galaxies" -- which are faint clusters of stars that have barely changed in the last 13 billion years. However, sky surveys that only a handful of these galaxies exist (rather than the thousands that are predicted by theories), and they are starved of stars.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Culture minister Ed Vaizey has published an open letter to Ofcom broadly supporting the regulator's efforts to mitigate disruption to Freeview by next-gen mobile broadband.…
Fujitsu has walked away from bidding for a slice of the £530m Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) pie that the government set aside to improve the country's broadband network.…
Penguins are stressed out by people, but research shows that the disturbed birds are getting used to humans.
Researchers compared 15 king penguins who were breeding in areas disturbed daily by humans, with 18 penguins breeding in areas free from human presence. All 33 birds were brooding a chick aged from 2 days to 1 month.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
TV videogames are due for a disruption. Is a $99 (£63) console called Ouya the device that could do it?
It wasn't that long ago that the vast majority of portable videogames were purchased much like console games, on a disc or cartridge for $30-40 (£19-£26) each. Smartphones have since thoroughly disrupted that market, giving gamers an array of portable devices that play games with an upfront cost of either 99p or nothing at all, with much of that money being funneled directly into developers' pockets.
By: Chris Kohler, Edited by: Ian Steadman
Development of the Skylon spaceplane has passed a critical milestone following tests on the key component for its Sabre engine.
The engine, being developed by Reaction Engines Ltd, looks set to revolutionise not only space travel but also air transport around the world.
By: Paul Sutherland, Sen.com, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Government-funded black boxes that monitor the UK's internet traffic are not "the cornerstone" of the Home Office's web super-snoop plan, a top spook has told MPs and peers.…
Packaging giant Bemis and Norway's ThinFilm will print sticky labels capable of monitoring and remembering the conditions in which their attached goods have been stored.…
Big Switch Networks is not even out of stealth mode and has not yet revealed its aspirations and products for software defined networks – SDNs, in modern parlance – and yet the company is nonetheless contributing to the open source efforts to build more flexible and virtual network infrastructure and hoping to build awareness ahead of its eventual launch.…
With the US presidential election less than four months away, it's high time for the opening of the Silly Season™ of polls and surveys – such as the one released by mobile marketing and advertising firm Velti, which claims that if only iPhone and Android-device owners could vote, Barack Obama would trounce Mitt Romney in a landslide.…
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has been trying to patent a satellite navigation signal that will allow people to use both GPS and the EU's Galileo system -- but apparently they didn't ask if everyone else was OK with that.
Now the US government is worried that it will have to start paying more to use systems it thought were effectively open for all, even though it part-funded their development in the first place.
By: Ian Steadman, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Two more makers of Android-powered devices have signed patent-licensing agreements with Microsoft, proving yet again that Windows Phone doesn't need to match Android's sales for Microsoft to eat part of its lunch.…
The hacktivists are back, targeting the users of forums and sites where illegal images of underage children are posted and shared.
In a YouTube video posted on 8 July, a voice-to-speech program reads out a statement claiming that Anonymous "aims to diminish if not eradicate this plague from the internet".
By: Ian Steadman, Edited by: Olivia Solon
Beleaguered mobile firm Research in Motion is really scraping the bottom of the barrel, and is looking to sell one of its two corporate jets to try to save some money.…
UK sysadmins woke up to a headache this morning after a major power cut at Level 3's data centre in Braham Street, East London, lasted for approximately five hours.…
This month Wired looks at apps to get you going in the morning.
By: Nate Lanxon, Edited by: Ian Steadman
The idea that animal evolution is shaped by males boasting and fighting to win female favour is a central biological dogma.
Females pick males whose exaggerated traits suggest virility, thus producing peacock feathers and sage grouse struts. Males compete for female favour, hence a stag's antlers and fights for territorial domination. These are the main engines of sexual selection, the default explanation for differences between the sexes.
By: Brandon Keim, Edited by: Ian Steadman
China is celebrating another technology milestone after claiming that smartphone shipments in the world’s biggest mobile market have now exceeded feature phone shipments, although analysts have their doubts.…
A UK judge has handed Samsung a victory in its court battle with Apple over design similarities between its Galaxy Tab line and the Cupertinian iPad – but for a reason sure to rankle the Korean manufacturer's design department.…
Lookout Mobile Security has taken steps towards classifying privacy-eroding phone apps as malign and ripe for removal from devices by its antivirus software.…
American cellular networks are unhappy with a Federal Election Commission decision to permit political donations by text message, despite the fact that such a facility could change politics entirely.…
A team of engineers has released a program that uses anomalies in the Earth's magnetic field to locate smartphone users inside buildings to within 0.1 and two metres accuracy -- a method employed by birds, lobsters and sea turtles.
Unlike traditional tracking services, there is no need for an internet connection -- Finnish firm IndoorAtlas has made use of the compasses already built into most smartphones, along with manipulations in the Earth's magnetic field created by the steel shells of modern buildings.
By: Liat Clark, Edited by: Duncan Geere
A judge in the UK has ruled that Samsung's Galaxy Tab does not infringe upon Apple's design, because the Android-powered tablet is "not as cool" as the iPad.
Describing Apple's tablet, high court judge Colin Birss cooed over the iPad's "striking" design, calling it "an object the informed user would want to pick up and hold." Briss noted that the "cool design" is "understated, smooth and simple".
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Facebook and Yahoo! are friends again after their lawyers cobbled together a settlement in their shouting match over patents.…
BlackBerry's app store – BlackBerry App World – has notched up 3 billion downloads, parent company RIM boasted in a upbeat developers' blog post.…
If you woke up this morning to find you couldn't connect to the web, then you might have be infected with a particularly sneaky piece of malware -- DNSChanger.
You won't be the only one. Potentially hundreds of thousands of other people around the world will also be getting nothing but an error message, as the FBI closes down the servers that those computers have been using for the past year.
Wait, the FBI?
The US government hasn't moved into the ISP business. Those computers have all been infected with a malicious bit of malware that needed those servers to stay online. If you're now locked off the web, you're probably one of them.
By: Ian Steadman, Edited by: Nate Lanxon
"I've been in this industry since many of you were sperm," says Peter Molyneux, on stage at the Rezzed videogames conference in Brighton. "And I truly love what I do. I love it as much today as I did when I sat down at my Acorn and wrote my first game."
In a blue polo shirt, and wearing jeans and trainers, Molyneux seems to be in a good mood. After releasing himself from his contract with Microsoft and Lionhead Studios, he's once again a free agent, and he's loving that freedom.
By: Duncan Geere, Edited by: Liat Clark
Shoothil, a data visualisation firm based in Shrewsbury, has built a live flood warning map that uses data supplied by the UK Environment Agency.
The Environment Agency has a nationwide network of monitoring stations, that issues flood warnings and alerts. Shoothill's map takes all the alerts from the last 15 minutes and lays them over a Bing map.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Japanese researchers have come up with a solution to one of the biggest problems facing electric cars: their woefully limited battery life. A team from the Toyohashi University of Technology has managed to pass electricity through ten centimetres of concrete, potentially enabling cars to charge while they drive.
The project is called Electric Vehicle on Electrified Roadway (Ever), and it uses inductive coupling to transfer 50 to 60 watts through a concrete block. The block is about the same thickness as those used on public roads in Japan.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Nasa's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) is now less than a month away from Mars. The largest ever rover will attempt an ambitious landing by sky crane when it arrives at the red planet early on August 6.
The chosen landing site for the Curiosity rover is the Gale Crater where it will spend a Martian year looking for signs of microbial life.
By: Charles Black, Sen.com, Edited by: Duncan Geere
The US is pricing up a $40m fibre-optic cable connecting Guantanamo Bay to the US mainland, providing broadband connectivity to the place where 169 inmates still languish.…
Microsoft's Xbox Live service is down, apparently across the world, and Redmond is trying to sort out the problems so gamers can get their Friday fix.…
It was only a matter of time before rumours started circulating that Amazon wanted to build a smartphone, since every tech firm worth their salt these days has to be rumoured to be taking on either the iPhone or the iPad.…
NatWest is asking volunteers to test its pay-by-bonk service on their iPhones, and is looking for 1,000 of its customers willing to wrap their iPhone in an iCarte case with embedded NFC.…
French operator SFR plans to cut costs by at least €500m (£398.5m) next year, according to union sources, and that's in addition to the €450m in cuts already in process.…
Airplane mode is shouting at me. I've had enough. This can't go on any more. I need to turn my phone back on. There is, you see, nothing noisier than a phone that's turned off. Because you are aware, and nervous, that when you turn it back on again you'll be confronted with a backlog of messages and voicemails. We now talk about information overload and the tyranny of being always connected, devices in pockets, and false feelings of vibrations making you grab at your phone at random moments. The constant battle to not keep checking your inbox.
But perhaps it's not actually the technology that is the problem, but the social arrangements you have with the people you talk to. If by habit or design your correspondents have grown to expect you to have your phone on all the time, it can become oppressively difficult to disconnect without risking a social backlash, or even outright suspicion.
By: Ben Hammersley, Edited by: Ian Steadman
South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius is headed to the Olympics, a historic event almost certain to validate the double-amputee's quest to be considered "a runner," not a "disabled runner."
The 25-year-old will run for the South African Olympic team, making him the first amputee to run in both the Olympic and Paralympic games. In what is sure to be one of the big draws of the Games, Pistorius -- whose legs were amputated below the knee before he was 1 year old -- will run in the individual 400 metre race and the 4×400 metre relay in London.
By: Jason Paur, Edited by: Ian Steadman
Red Hat is bullish on cloud computing. That's no surprise: Its version of GNU/Linux has been a driving force behind the last decade's infrastructure revolution, from which the idea of cloud computing arose.
Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst is coming up on his five-year anniversary at the helm, following his arrival in December 2007. Under Whitehurst's leadership, Red Hat's revenue has grown from $523 million in its fiscal 2008 to more than $1.1 billion in its fiscal 2012, without deviating from its core strategy of open source infrastructure software.
With Adobe's divestment of Flex and mobile Flash and Microsoft's move from Silverlight to Metro, Oracle now seems all alone in believing that a fat client framework -- in the form of JavaFX -- is a worthwhile investment.
Fewer and fewer options exist for developing purely fat client desktop applications and fewer still for RAD applications with Web-based delivery (aka, "thick clients"). We are on the verge of a purely HTML/JavaScript client world.
Red Hat is planning to roll out a number of product sets for building hybrid clouds over the next few months, the company announced Wednesday at the Red Hat Summit conference in Boston.
The Eclipse Foundation, which has been a staple for open source development tools for most of the past decade, will offer its annual "release train" on Wednesday, featuring tools for mobile application development and a new base platform itself.
With nearly 1 billion users worldwide and 500 million people visiting its social network every day, Facebook has its work cut out for it in managing its systems. To help do that, the company has been developing its own management and development tools tuned to its specific needs, rather than relying on commercial offerings.
There are a growing number of open source cloud infrastructure players in the market, but Eucalyptus says it is the best bet for private enterprise clouds. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix caught up with CEO Mårten Mickos, who, as the former CEO of MySQL, has loads of experience growing significant open source companies, to learn more about the company and how Mickos sees private clouds evolving.
Last week I caught up with Rackspace president Lew Moorman at the GigaOM Structure event to promote OpenStack, the open source "cloud operating system" started by Rackspace and NASA.
While some of the open source projects that Sun Microsystems created -- and which I used to work with -- have maintained a high profile, the one most associated with Sun in the minds of system administrators has been strangely forgotten. Whatever happened to OpenSolaris?
The OpenSolaris story illustrates a key value delivered by the liberties provided via open source. When your vendor changes direction, what do you do? Traditionally, you have five options:
With the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.3, Red Hat has tweaked the enterprise grade Linux distribution to add new capabilities in storage, virtualization, security, scalability, and performance.
"This is one of largest update release to date," said Tim Burke, Red Hat vice president of Linux engineering development. "It has a lot of performance scalability optimizations specifically targeted at virtualized cloud deployments in the data center."
Enterprise open source software provider Red Hat has jumped into the emerging NoSQL market, releasing an in-memory data store as part of an update of its JBoss management platform.
Since last year, Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos has acknowledged that his company hasn't done a great job in engaging and retaining support from the open sour
When your Linux server starts feeling sluggish, you might benefit from looking at your swap space and gauging whether it's adequately sized for your system's workload. Fortunately, Linux has some handy commands for helping you get a good picture of your system's behavior.
Setting your swap space to be twice the size of your RAM is a good rule of thumb, but systems with very large amounts of memory likely won't likely need anywhere near that amount of swap. Besides, adding it later is easy if you have adequate disk space.
The new Defensive Patent License (DPL), launched this week by two UC Berkeley law professors, offers an improved way for businesses -- especially small businesses -- to protect themselves from patent attacks. Over time, it may also disarm patent trolls by reducing the supply of "weaponized" patents.
Running what they believe is the world's largest Hadoop-based collection of data, Facebook engineers have developed a way to circumnavigate a core weakness of the data analysis platform, that of relying on only a single name server to coordinate all operations.
In an effort to secure a spot as the de facto virtualization provider for all things Hadoop, VMware today announced an open s
via Open Source Software - Infoworld http://images.infoworld.com/t/cloud-computing/vmware-bets-big-data-it-brings-hadoop-virtual-world-195457?source=rss_open_source_software
Developers at open-source nonprofit organization Linaro have posted a set of code tweaks for Android, enabling up to 100 percent increases in performance, compared to a vanilla version of Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich."
For the first production release of what will be its flagship Apache Hadoop distribution, Hortonworks has focused on providing a set of tools to help deploy, manage, and extend the data analysis platform.
"Hortonworks' goal is to make Hadoop easy to use and consume," said John Kreisa, Hortonworks vice president of marketing.
The phrase "open source hardware" sounds silly. Open source software tends to come in a free version, but hardware, not so much. Yet the folks at the Open Compute Project, led by Facebook, insist on the phrase.
What they really mean is that the hardware designs, including full specs and CAD files, are open source. So why would the Open Compute Project create intellectual property of significant value and give it away?
Let's look at some basic commands that report on memory usage. The first that probably comes to mind is free. The free command will tell you about used and unused memory and about swap space. Physical memory is the random access storage provided by the RAM modules plugged into your motherboard. Swap is some portion of space on your hard drive that is used as if it is an extension of your physical memory.
The University of York has opened up a multi-million pound Biorenewables Development Centre, to provide the industry with processes to convert plants and biowaste into products and useful chemicals.
Full-time researchers will forge genetics and chemistry to create renewable chemicals and materials, and develop manufacturing technologies that use plants, microbes and biowastes as raw materials.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
