Coming on the heels of Microsoft's Office 2013 announcement, Redmond has launched a new version of its browser-based Office Web Apps, which are available now to SkyDrive users who join the preview program.…
Coming on the heels of Microsoft's Office 2013 announcement, Redmond has launched a new version of its browser-based Office Web Apps, which are available now to SkyDrive users who join the preview program.…
Australia's premier airline, Qantas, will provide an iPad to each and every passenger on its fleet of Boeing 767s, beaming free in-flight entertainment using what it dubs its "QStreaming" technology.…
Researchers at MIT have compared images of Titan's rivers with models of river evolution on Earth, to find out that the methane networks on Saturn's largest moon have created surprisingly little erosion.
Graduate student Benjamin Black compared his measurements of Titan's river networks (using images from Nasa's Cassini probe) with a model of Earth's waterways, and found the moon's rivers most resembled the early stages of a terrestrial river's evolution.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Olivia Solon
On the show this week we discuss the discovery of medieval bras, Yahoo's new CEO snatched from Google, nanobots building an island made from old plastic, 'amazeballs' going in the dictionary and the rest of the week in Wired news.
By: Nate Lanxon,
On the show this week we discuss the discovery of medieval bras, Yahoo's new CEO snatched from Google, nanobots building an island made from old plastic, 'amazeballs' going in the dictionary and the rest of the week in Wired news.
By: Nate Lanxon,
The Dutch mobile operator-banking consortium, formed to create a level-playing field for pay-by-wave NFC technology, has broken up.…
Twitter is attempting to make promoted tweets a bit more personal. New "targeted tweets" let advertisers send sponsored messages to specific locations and devices.
Promoted tweets are paid-for messages that appear in search results and on your timeline. Brand owners can now make tweets for specific audiences on Twitter, instead of sending generic tweets to all users.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Olivia Solon
Over the last several decades, researchers have shown that many dolphin and whale species are extraordinarily intelligent and social creatures, with complex cultures and rich inner lives. They are, in a word, persons.
Now animal advocates are challenging society to follow science to its logical conclusion and give legal rights to cetaceans. In the next several years, they intend to make their case in a court of law. If they're successful, a dolphin could conceivably become the first non-human ever considered a legal person.
By: Brandon Keim, Edited by: Ian Steadman
A trillion here and a trillion there; pretty soon you're talking about real storage.…
BP Oil will push 100,000 staff mailboxes into the cloud after the fuel giant signed a deal with Deutsche Telekom's T-Systems division to reorganise its internal communications.…
BT has unsurprisingly won hefty government funds to roll out a faster broadband network to Wales.…
SingTel Optus will hand over its 400,000 HFC network customers to NBN Co and decommission parts of the network following the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s final approval of the AU$800 million HFC asset deal.…
Amazon Web Services (AWS) says magnetic disks cannot handle modern NoSQL-powered applications, which have such high throughputs and generate such weirdly bursty traffic that spinning rust looks and feels as slow and awkward as tape.…
The beta versions of Apple's iOS 6 limit the number of apps that you can have installed on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch – a limitation that didn't exist on iOS 4 or iOS 5.…
There's life in mid-range tape libraries yet, and Oracle has a new one, an SL150 chugging down data at 10TB/hour, faster than the competing kit from Quantum and Spectra. It's aiming the new kit at medium-sized businesses that are finding that they need a more grown-up storage solution.…
Nokia managed to shift 4 million Lumia handsets in the second quarter of 2012, and while it didn't make money during the period, it isn't as broke as many had feared it would be.…
Google has created a not-exactly-secure Gmail-over-text-message service for use on old mobiles in parts of Africa.…
Vodafone customers relying on Sure Signal boxes for mobile connectivity have been hit by an update that left them less connected than ever.…
Apple has finally taken control of the internet domain name apple.co.uk, which has been in third-party hands since at least 1996.…
A judge has ruled that Apple must post a notice on its UK homepage to say that Samsung did not copy the design of the iPad with its Galaxy Tab. It must also take out advertisements in several newspapers and magazines, to the same effect.
It follows a ruling on 9 July, where high court judge Colin Birss said that that Samsung's tablet does not infringe upon Apple's design, because the Android-powered Galaxy Tab is "not as cool" as the iPad.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Olivia Solon
A team of Austrian archaeologists have discovered four bras from the 15th century. It reveals that women wore the garment some 500 years before fashion historians thought it was invented.
About 2,700 textile fragments were found in Castle Lengberg in Tyrol, Austria, by researchers from the University of Innsbruck. Alongside fragments of a male codpiece, lots of shoes, and some shirts, archaeologists discovered four linen bras.
By: Mark Brown,
Meerkat-obsessed Compare the Market, which became the first company to lose a cybersquatting complaint over a .xxx domain name, has lost its appeal against the ruling.…
In the decade since 9/11, the US government has used a wide variety of tactics against terrorists. It's invaded countries where they operated (and ones where they didn't). It's tried to win the backing of foreign populations in which the terrorists hide. And it's sent commandos and deadly flying robots to kill them one by one.
One thing it hasn't done, until now: troll them.
By: Spencer Ackerman, Edited by: Ian Steadman
Haven’t you noticed? Java, the red-headed stepchild of the phone world, has conquered the world by default. The platform written off just a few years ago as bloated, cumbersome and inefficient is now inescapable.…
The developed world has lost its appetite for terrestrial internet connections, but is hungry for vast increases in wireless connectivity, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD's) latest data on broadband adoption among its 34 members.…
Australia needs an extra 100 million phone numbers for mobile devices, says the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), which has taken the first step towards that goal by setting out plans for new numbers that start with “05”. All Australian mobile numbers have, until now, started with “04”.…
If you are dying to see how software running on a bona fide ARM server stacks up against a Xeon server, then TryStack.org has some time slices running the OpenStack cloudy fabric that have your name written all over them.…
PayPal has acquired a start-up called Card.io, which lets developers read credit card information using a smartphone's camera.
"We first met with the team at card.io when we were working on integrating their technology into the PayPal Here mobile app," said Hill Ferguson, vice president of global product over at PayPal.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Following last week's O2 mobile network outage, the telco is giving contract customers three days of free connectivity in compensation. Pre-paid users will get an additional topup, and everyone gets £10 to spend in the O2 store.…
Brits are chatting online and spewing messages from phones more than ever as gossiping in voice calls declines for the first time.…
A Dutch musicians' rights group has been fined for "stealing" music from a client and using it without permission or paying royalties.
It started in 2006 when the Hollywood-funded anti-piracy group Brein asked Melchior Rietveldt to compose music for an anti-piracy video that was to be shown only at a local film festival. However, in 2007, Rietveldt found out that his music was also being used on a Harry Potter DVD that was being distributed globally without his permission.
By: Olivia Solon, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Raytheon has inked a $636 million (£400m) contract to provide Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicles to Boeing.
EKVs are high-speed projectiles that can obliterate incoming warheads and missiles by slamming straight into them -- at breakneck speeds of 10 km/s. Raytheon describes the concept as "hit to kill."
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
The man who registered the domain name facebook.info has lost a cybersquatting case, after Facebook used his own eight-year-old Facebook account as evidence against him.…
In August 2012, Nasa will launch a pair of probes to measure the Van Allen Radiation Belts, which are two enormous doughnuts of plasma that surround our planet.
The belts are sandwiched between satellites in geostationary and low Earth orbits. The inner belt stays relatively stable, but the outer one unpredictably swells in size as the number of charged particles grows, encompassing many satellites in the process.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
BT has been awarded a £70m contract from North Yorkshire county council just days after Fujitsu walked away from bidding for any government broadband funds in the UK.…
Chinese telecoms outfit ZTE has hit back at rumours suggesting it will respond to sliding market share and a scary balance sheet by shedding 12,000 staff. Instead, the company says, we can expect a graduate hiring spree.…
A new report on smartphone buying plans provides excellent news for Apple, so-so news for Android-handset manufacturers, and downright lousy news for RIM.…
CumuLogic, a platform cloud provider founded by some ex-Sunners with Java and cloud expertise, is delivering its first platform cloud layer for public and private infrastructure clouds.…
A "major ISP" has told the BBC that the legal ban forcing them to prevent access to the Pirate Bay has failed to deter filesharers.
While activity on the site might have dropped around 11 percent when the ban came into effect, only a few months later traffic levels were now "pretty much back to where they were," it said.
By: Ian Steadman, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Google has added a selection of panoramas of Antarctica to its Street View maps feature, covering Shackleton and Scott's huts, among other locations.
The search giant released its first Antarctic panoramas back in 2010, covering Crescent Island and a large gathering of penguins. Now, however, that's been bulked out by several more scenes from the continent.
By: Duncan Geere, Edited by: Nate Lanxon
Morphlabs, Are offounded five years ago to peddle a cloud management tool called AppSpace on top of Amazon's EC2 compute cloud, is moving more aggressively into the cloudy hardware business with its second preconfigured cloud-in-the box setup based on the open source OpenStack cloud controller.…
The Wholesale Applications Community has been voluntarily subsumed by the GSMA, selling off its technology and giving up its independence. The app store which never was will now never be.…
The Wholesale Applications Community has been voluntarily subsumed by the GSMA, selling off its technology and giving up its independence. The app store which never was will now never be.…
However unlikely it may seem, Microsoft just announced two new versions of Office, and the new builds aren't pieces of inscrutable, soul-killing bloatware per the company's productivity suite tradition. Believe it or not, Microsoft has finally made Office borderline cool.
Facing competition from Google Drive and Apple's iWork/iCloud integration, Microsoft is stepping up its game, making real strides in an Office suite that everyone uses, but no one really enjoys. On Monday, Microsoft officially unveiled Office 2013 and Office 365. With the cloud at center stage and a refreshed design borrowed from the Windows 8 Metro interface, the new Microsoft Office is actually relevant -- and enjoyable to use.
By: Alexandra Chang, Edited by: Ian Steadman
A British chip-design company has sold its mobile and GPS location-finding tech wing to Samsung for $310 million (£198m).…
PalmOS users who've become objects of ridicule with their refusal to upgrade can now switch to Android while keeping the favourite PalmOS apps.…
China may have the full weight of the government behind its push towards improving fixed line broadband penetration in the country, but it’s still lagging far behind the UK, according to the latest stats from local content delivery firm ChinaCache.…
Five top multinational oil companies have been targeted by members of Anonymous, who published about 1,000 email addresses for accounts belonging to the firms, as well as hashed and unencrypted passwords.
The hacks, against Shell, Exxon, BP and two Russian firms -- Gazprom and Rosneft, were conducted as digital protests against drilling in the Arctic, a practice that critics say has contributed to the melting of the ice caps there.
By: Kim Zetter, Edited by: Ian Steadman
Sky today launched its Now TV vid-on-demand service, but only managed to notify the right regulator hours before the off as it's getting harder to remember who controls what.…
Rumors of an impending Apple iPad mini continue to proliferate, with The New York Times being the latest to weigh in, and Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal already having had their say, so it's a good time to recount the late Steve Jobs's arguments as to why such a device will be doomed to failure.…
Every Windows phone Nokia sold in the US has been backed by a $450 slice of AT&T marketing cash, it's estimated.…
Deploying giant space mirrors and spraying particles from stadium-sized balloons may sound like an engineer's wild fantasy, but cliamte models suggest that the potential of geoengineering to combat rising atmospheric carbon dioxide may be significantly overstated.
Through a variety of computer simulations used for reporting to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the team investigated a scenario where an increase in the world's atmospheric carbon dioxide levels was balanced by a "dimming" of the sun.
By: Joel Winston, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Police, security services and other public bodies bungled nearly 1,000 requests for citizens' communications data in a year, a new report has revealed.…
Chinese telecoms kit maker ZTE is in for a rough ride: its shares fell to a three-year low on Monday amid a profit warning and rumours that it may axe up to 12,000 workers.…
You can learn a lot about what's going on inside a cat's mind by paying attention to its ear movements. If kitty is angry or tired, her ears may tilt away from her face or droop. And if your cat is on high alert, her ears will stick straight up in the air like twin sentinels.
These telling ear movements inspire Necomimi's Brainwave Controlled Cat Ears, an impossibly cute headset that theoretically puts all your mind's machinations on display. In essence, the headset reads your mind, and translates your cognitive states into prosthetic ear movements.
By: Christina Bonnington, Edited by: Ian Steadman
The Sun is becoming increasingly active as it heads towards the maximum of the eleven year solar cycle in 2013, and two powerful solar flares have erupted so far during July.
The first flare erupted from the limb of the solar disc in active region 1515 on 6 July, and was classed as an X 1.1 flare. X-class flares are the most powerful type of solar flares, with M-class being slightly less powerful.
By: Amanda Doyle, SEN.com, Edited by: Duncan Geere
The number of registered domain names on the internet increased by 7.5 million to stand at 233 million in the first quarter of the year.…
We all feel as if the world is accelerating at warp speed. How do we maintain relevancy, balance and purpose as we wrestle our bloated inboxes? I want to explore how to function, thrive and achieve balance in this brave new world.
We have entered an age of chaos (in the mathematical sense), marked by accelerated change and unpredictability. Witness 2008's "de-correlation crisis" and Instagram's sale; outcomes best seen as fractal.
By: Fred Destin, Edited by: Ian Steadman
Vodafone and Three will be sharing cell sites and support infrastructure in Ireland, reducing costs to both parties while each operator maintains its network independence.…
Back in April, the FCC proposed revising how contributions are made to America’s Universal Service Fund (USF), suggesting drawing international cable operators into the fund’s ambit.…
Alec Saunders, RIM's VP of developer relations, wishes the press and analyst community would get its "bleeding" story straight about the BlackBerry developer community.…
Nasuni has fulfilled its promise to add unified storage to its existing NAS cloud storage product. The tech is managed from a central site and branch offices no longer need an admin.…
If you've managed to get your hands on one of Apple's new MacBook Pros, you'll have spotted that most apps don't look that great on it yet.
The high-pixel-density Retina display runs at a resolution of 2,880 x 1,800, allowing for four times the number of pixels as the previous model. But most software isn't built for resolutions that high, so Apple has doubled up the pixels on old apps. On the one hand, that means you can still use those apps, but on the other hand it means that edges are jagged and don't look great.
Unfortunately, the only thing that'll fix that is a software update from the developer of the app. That's going to take some time, but already some developers have started pushing out updates that enable Retina resolutions for their apps on the new Macbook Pro. We've rounded up ten of the best.
By: Duncan Geere, Edited by: Nate Lanxon
This week an artist genetically engineers a mouse with the DNA of Elvis Presley, the roars of dinosaurs are recreated in a spooky video, an Android-powered console could revolutionise home videogames and we discuss the rest of the week in Wired news.
By: Nate Lanxon,
A team of researchers from the Technical University of Hamburg and the University of Kiel say they have discovered the world's lightest material. They call it aerographite.
The material is a matrix of hollow carbon tubes, which are grown at the nano and micro scales. The complex lattice is mostly empty space -- in fact, it's composed of about 99.99% air. In all, the material weighs just 0.2 milligrams per cubic centimetre.
By: Mark Brown,
Brussels' vice-president Neelie 'Steelie' Kroes has confirmed that telco incumbents in Europe will not be reprimanded for using copper pricing as a barrier to rolling out fibre networks.…
A fake business set up on Facebook by the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones received thousands of fake endorsements – and Facebook doesn't seem to care.…
Metropolitan Police officials plan to build a system that can be used to gather and catalogue video evidence that members of the public have captured on their mobile phones.
The project, which is inspired by "user-generated content" archives used by news outlets, follows after the riots in London last August, where smartphone footage was used alongside CCTV in follow-up court cases.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
O2 has fixed its poorly mobile network, so now everyone can start asking what went wrong and what the company is going to do about it.…
In order to motivate people to change their behaviour in order to address global challenges such as climate change we should look to the cosmos, argued philosopher of science Nancy Ellen Abrams at DLD Women.
"Global problems can't be solved by any group, country or any known religious or political system. They operate on a scale that's outside of our experience and intuition," she said.
By: Olivia Solon, Edited by: Nate Lanxon
The Icelandic partner of Visa and MasterCard violated contract laws when it imposed a block against credit card donations to the secret-spilling site WikiLeaks, a district court there has ruled.
The ReykjavÃk District Court ruled that Valitor, which handles Visa and MasterCard payments in Iceland, was in the wrong when it prevented card holders from donating funds to the site. The court ruled that the block should be removed within 14 days or Valitor will be fined the equivalent of about £4,000 a day.
By: Kim Zetter, Edited by: Ian Steadman
They look unassuming, but these quiet types murmuring strings of numbers and letters into their transceivers are manning back-up comms for the world, the communication system most likely to survive an apocalyptic event.…
In a move sure to spark another round of Australian supplier angst, US corporate and military satellite provider ViaSat Inc has secured NBN Co’s coveted regional satellite tender, valued at an initial $AU280 million.…
Virgin Galactic is to go into the satellite-launching business as a parallel operation to tourist trips, Richard Branson has confirmed.
Payloads up to 225 kg in weight will be sent into orbit as early as in 2016 by an air-launcher that will be flown attached to WhiteKnightTwo.
By: Paul Sutherland, Sen.com, Edited by: Duncan Geere
UK climate secretary Ed Davey is calling on European leaders to make big strides at this year's UN climate change summit in Doha, and reiterated his desire to see the 2020 emissions cut target rise from 20 to 30 percent.
"Doha is unlikely to be an epoch-making event -- but it needs to be a significant step in taking the Durban platform forward," Davey said, in a speech at Chatham House on 11 July.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
