Disaster has struck UK customers of the Doyenz rCloud disaster recovery service: it's apparently closing down.…
Network operators from South Korea and the United States were both claiming victory on Wednesday after racing right down to the wire to become the first in the world to offer voice over LTE (VoLTE) services.…
Stop the presses! Eject! Nuke! There's no denying it's more fun to slap a big red button than to gingerly flip a switch. But browsing the aisles at B&Q, you won't find any such warp actuators among the brushed nickel and light almond plastic light switches.
Enter mechanical engineer Sam Feller, designer of the panic button replacement kit ($24.99, or £15.95). "Any time I see a red button in a machine shop I just want to push it, but we're not supposed to," Feller says. After testing industrial-grade models, he found they were too expensive and not ideal for domestic use. That led Feller down the entrepreneurial path. "If I wanted one so badly, I thought other people might want them as well," he says.
By: Joseph Flaherty, Edited by: Nate Lanxon
EMEA private cloud wannabees can now enjoy servicing themselves with a single, ready-to-use, all-in-one Fujitsu private cloud product.…
While most of the world is treating the once-mighty Blackberry as an also-ran in the smartphone market, malware authors still think it’s worth a crack – and have crafted a package designed to drop a Zeus malware variant on the device.…
Opscode, the commercial entity behind the open source Chef configuration management tool for servers and their software, is getting into the services racket. Not just because it wants another revenue stream, but because customers need help getting up to speed on using Chef quickly.…
If VMware needed another reason to justify its $1.26bn acquisition of network virtualization upstart Nicira, it need look no further than online auctioneer eBay.…
A startup established by a group of MIT students and alumni is bringing solar technology to medical clinics in Lesotho, with the aim of generating electricity and hot water.
Matthew Orosz has developed a system that uses mirrored parabolic troughs to capture sunlight, heating fluid in a pipe along the middle of the trough. That fluid is used to generate electricity in the exact opposite way that an air conditioner works -- instead of turning electricity and warm fluid into cold air, it uses hot fluid and cold air to generate electricity. The resulting contraption is known as an organic Rankine cycle, or "Orc", engine.
By: Duncan Geere, Edited by: Nate Lanxon
Desperate to squeeze money from its mobile users, Facebook is trialling mobile-app advertising, auctioning news-feed slots to the mobile developer who bids highest.…
A coalition of online organisations wants millions of internet users to sign a declaration that promotes internet freedom, to give normal citizens the political brunt to defeat contentious anti-internet bills like SOPA and PIPA.
It's called the Declaration of Internet Freedom, and it carries five basic principles. "Expression" says that the internet can't be censored , and "Access". promotes universal access to fast and affordable network.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Social-networking-for-suits outfit LinkedIn has revamped its application programming interface (API) terms of use to allow developers to better exploit the website.…
Twitter has given cops details of a tweeter who threatened to go on a shooting rampage at a performance of ex-boxer Mike Tyson's one-man show.…
Apple has been granted a patent on organising shopping lists, but not on shopping itself despite appearances.…
Jimmy Wales has claimed that he couldn't have founded Wikipedia in the UK because the nation's libel law adds unpredictability and "friction" to hosting the world's largest unreliable collection of factoids.…
Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has captured an image that shows where Curiosity, and its various bits of landing gear, touched down in the Martian Gale Crater.
The picture, snapped by the orbiter's High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), reveals the final fate for the four components that helped Curiosity survive its nail-biting, seven-minute descent.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Apple presented a massive 132-page internal Samsung document that showed the South Korean firm comparing every inch of the iPhone with its early Galaxy S phone in its patent ruckus yesterday.…
A phone on a pub table may be threatened by more than puddles of ale as RapidNFC has signed a deal with Rutland Print to craft beer mats that beam web addresses to mobes over the air.…
Apple has played something of a trump card, in its ongoing legal battle against Samsung.
Internal documents show Samsung directly comparing its Galaxy S to the iPhone, making recommendations on which features to borrow from Apple, and executive orders to cover up the mimicry.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
With the latest Judge Dredd movie only weeks away from release, the character's long-running parent publication 2000 AD has announced that digital copies will be published simultaneously with print through Apple's newsstand system, effective immediately.
Despite its futuristic name (which admittedly worked better when the series was launched, in 1977) the British sci-fi anthology comic has been living in the past, relying on a combination of subscriptions, high street outlets and specialist shops to provide readers with their weekly dose of Dredd.
By: James Hunt, Edited by: Duncan Geere
They're hit and thrown. They're caught, dunked, headed, passed, saved, served, set, shot, slammed, smashed and spiked. One is even put-ed. They're big and small, ethereally light and surprisingly heavy. From table tennis to men's basketball, here are all the balls (and one sphere) used in the 2012 Summer Games.
By: Mark McClusky, Edited by: Ian Steadman
A number of Virgin Media customers were wrongly billed for mobile data usage last month due to a system error, The Register has learned.…
Siri beware - a handful of major Chinese telecoms operators, handset manufacturers and other tech firms have joined up to form the Speech Industry Alliance of China (SIAC), a new group which will look at exploiting the growing domestic appetite for speech-based applications.…
PSMA Australia Limited, a company that produces spatial information using government sources, has defended the quality of its products in the face of criticism from NBNCo CEO Mike Quigley.…
NBNCo has released its Corporate Plan (PDF)for 2012-2015, updating the projected costs and build speed for the project.…
Allegations of discrimination against foreign mobile operators, unfairly high start prices for spectrum bidders and yet more government delays have thrown India’s 2G auctions into chaos once again over the past few days.…
The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) is urging legislators to update the health protection requirements required of mobile phone manufacturers, but indicated some emissions limits might be increased rather than reduced.…
Anonymous' theft of data from a dormant AAPT server might not have been possible had the telco used a different host.…
Facebook, whose legendary misogyny means that breast-feeding images posted by mothers are considered taboo and pulled as soon as they’re noticed, has managed to lurch into action and take down a race-hate page in Australia after a storm erupted on Twitter.…
Rackspace Hosting, which co-founded the OpenStack cloud controller effort with NASA two years ago, was bragging last week that it had finally went live with OpenStack on the compute side.…
A free tool called iBatsID can identify 34 different species of bats from around Europe, by analysing the pips and speaks of their echolocation calls.
Charlotte Walters from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) worked with an international team of ecologists to select 1,350 calls (of 34 different European bat species) from EchoBank -- a library of more than 200,000 bat calls.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Operators, banks and loyalty schemes in Singapore can now use a common API to interact using short-range radio tech Near Field Communications, while in Europe similar schemes continue to flounder.…
Staff at the Seattle Children's hospital have created the Cat Immersion Project -- an audiovisual installation that brought thousands of virtual cats to a teenage cancer patient's room.
16-year-old cancer patient Maga Barzallo Sockemtickem had spent seven months in the hospital in 2011 and had to return for more treatment in July this year. Because of her compromised immune system, she had to be isolated and was unable to see her beloved cat Merry.
By: Olivia Solon, Edited by: Nate Lanxon
Unfortunate journo Mat Honan has said the demolition of his digital life by a hacker started with a call to Amazon customer support.…
YouTube has been unceremoniously dumped from iOS 6, the latest beta version of Apple's mobile operating system reveals.…
Facebook has - for the first time - opened up its network to gamblers wanting to play online via the service in the UK. The first gambling application on the social network was added this morning.…
In June this year Apple CEO Tim Cook shared with the waiting crowd at its Worldwide Development Conference that Apple would be giving access to the App Store to 32 new countries, bringing the total to 152.
Of those 32 new countries there are a number in Africa, ranging from countries like Chad with millions of potential app users to remote São Tomé and Príncipe with just thousands.
By: Guest Author, Edited by: Olivia Solon
If you missed out on Wired 2011, Wired magazine's editor David Rowan sits down to explain some of the many reasons you may not want to let Wired 2012 pass you by.
In addition to speakers such as Troy Carter, manager of Lady Gaga and Founder and CEO of Atom Factory; David Karp, founder and CEO of Tumblr; and Lily Cole, model, actress and sustainability champion, Wired 2012 will explore a series of trends that have been exciting the magazine's editors and readers over the last 12 months.
The short video embedded in this story is worth a few minutes of your time if your interest is piqued enough to want to learn more about this exciting two-day event.
By: Wired.co.uk Staff,
Samsung has become the latest big name tech brand accused of allowing widespread labour rights violations, after a new report claimed that Chinese manufacturing partner HEG is exploiting child workers as young as 14 at its Guangdong plant.…
Planetary Resources -- the billionaire-backed company that plans to mine minerals from asteroids -- will include a tiny satellite in each of its space telescopes.
The satellites are called CubeSats, and they're a standardised payload (a 10 cm sided cube, with a maximum weight of one kilogram) for putting university projects into space. Launching them, however, can be a costly and complicated process.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed. First my Google account was taken over, then deleted. Next my Twitter account was compromised, and used as a platform to broadcast racist and homophobic messages. And worst of all, my AppleID account was broken into, and my hackers used it to remotely erase all of the data on my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook.
In many ways, this was all my fault. My accounts were daisy-chained together. Getting into Amazon let my hackers get into my Apple ID account, which helped them get into Gmail, which gave them access to Twitter. Had I used two-factor authentication for my Google account, it's possible that none of this would have happened, because their ultimate goal was always to take over my Twitter account and wreak havoc. Lulz.
By: Mathew Honan, Edited by: Ian Steadman
Rackspace has hinted strongly at the announcement of a local data centre, with Australia/New Zealand Country Manager Mark Randall promising the company's "most significant investment" in Australia will be revealed on August 22nd.…
Iran’s leader Ayatollah Khamenei had best make the most of his time on Twitter and Instagram, since the country’s telecommunications minister is doggedly pressing ahead with his program to cut the country off from the Internet. In the fullness of time, as Sir Humphrey Appleby would have put it.…
Vodafone Australia will soon start to serve Ice Cream Sandwiches, Android-style, to owners of Samsung GALAXY Note handsets.…
Anand Chandrasekher, the man who was responsible for many of Intel's low-power mobile chip initiatives, has joined Qualcomm as its new chief marketing officer.…
Cell phone operator MetroPCS has unveiled a Samsung Galaxy variant capable of receiving Dyle TV. The cheapo network seems undeterred by other companies' inability to successfully broadcast television to mobile phones.…
Disney researchers have come up with a system called Botanicus Interactus, which can turn a typical household plant into a touch-sensitive computer peripheral.
A single wire is placed into the soil, and the plant is then transformed into an interactive toy. Now it can detect if and where a plant has been touched, or even if someone just gets near the plant.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Fount-of-dubious-knowledge Wikipedia has gone down around the world, prompting a Twitter frenzy from people who have to try to remember how to open books.…
The Radio Society of Great Britain is mobilising European radio hams in protest against the forthcoming standard for powerline networking, predicting dire consequences if existing standards aren't applied.…
Vodafone is investigating a glitch with its billing system that left its workers unable to access customer accounts today.…
Swiss boffins have been testing SMS-equipped sheep to see if they can send a warning text message when the big, bad wolf approaches, and it looks like they can.…
Nasa has awarded cash to 28 proposals, for forward-thinking concepts that wouldn't be out of place in a science fiction movie. That includes a system that could autonomously make concrete on Mars and a landsailing rover that would speed over the surface of Venus.
It's part of the Nasa Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, where the space agency funds ideas that might be used in space exploration a decade or more from now.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
An unmanned aerial vehicle is being piloted by archaeologist at Vanderbilt University as a means to create 3D maps of an abandoned Peruvian city.
Currently archaeological sites take years to map manually using satellite imagery and GPS data. However, the Suave system (semi-autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle), could allow archaeologists to map sites in minutes.
By: Olivia Solon, Edited by: Nate Lanxon
The drone of a mosquito is an irritant for most of us, sending us reaching for a rolled up newspaper or a spray of repellent to avoid an unpleasant itchy bite. But for millions of people in Africa these mosquitoes herald a much more serious threat -- malaria. Malaria is widespread, prevalent and deadly, particularly for young children in sub-Saharan Africa.
A recent report revealed the incredible statistic that one in three babies born in the UK today can now expect to live to 100 years old. Compare this to the outlook for babies born in sub-Saharan Africa where one in eight children die before their fifth birthday, nearly all from preventable diseases such as malaria, diarrhoea or pneumonia.
By: Guest Author, Edited by: Olivia Solon
Apple's demand that Samsung be censured for releasing evidence that had been struck out of the two companies' patent battle has been rejected by the presiding judge.…
US cloud backup vendor Carbonite has said it will contest the UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruling that its adverts claiming unlimited storage are misleading.…
On the show this week we discuss the Japanese company which lets you 3D print your unborn baby, a hackathon inviting coders to work on a tropical island, Buzz Aldrin's vision for the US to settle on Mars and the rest of the week in Wired news
By: Nate Lanxon, Edited by: Olivia Solon
Boeing, Space X and Sierra Nevada have been awarded Nasa's coveted "space taxi" contract.
The contract sets the operators a five-year target to get its spacecraft ready for US astronauts, though the initiative is ultimately aimed at getting a cost-effective commercial spaceflight industry up and running, with trips set to run back and form between low Earth orbit and the International Space Station.
By: Liat Clark, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Last week the Ofcom announced details of the upcoming 4G spectrum auction, only the regulator still can't say how much spectrum is on sale, what it will cost, or the annual rent due afterwards.…
The United States has said it will reject any proposals to surrender control of the internet to the United Nations.
This December, the United Nations will hold the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), where it will review and potentially revise the International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs) treaty.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
A species of deep sea squid can jettison its own bioluminescent arms to distract predators and attackers. Later, when the squid has safely escaped, it re-grows its lost limbs.
The octopus squid (Octopoteuthis deletron) is about 30 centimetres long, and is found at depths of 400 to 800 metres, in the northeast Pacific Ocean.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Prepare your Wookiee impressions now: It looks like there could be a Chewbacca movie coming.
And it's not being made by George Lucas.
By: Angela Watercutter, Edited by: Ian Steadman
It's been a little while since we've had babies in the house, and it seems that technology has moved on in the monitoring department since our rudimentary listening devices.
I remember evenings when we were only a few weeks into parenting, trying to relax in front of the TV while every snuffle on the Baby Monitor made us jump a mile high. We looked into other devices that monitored breathing and movement, but decided our stress levels were high enough with just sound.
By: Andy Robertson, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Apple wanted to integrate Twitter into iTunes, according some people "familiar" with negotiations between the two companies.…
Australian airline Qantas has denied claims it left a customer on hold … for 15 hours 40 minutes and one second.…
China’s bid to for world domination in all things mobile took another step in the last quarter as smartphone shipments leapt 199 per cent from the same period last year and now account for more than a quarter of the global total, according to Canalys.…
Streaming video provider Netflix has released Chaos Monkey, its homegrown tool that's designed to boost the resilience of cloud-based applications in the bluntest way possible: by knocking them down.…
Yet another round of Motorola Droid Razr HD prototype-leak rumours has been kicked off by a post to the XDA forums, picked up by Android Headlines.…
Google's unofficial codename for Android 4.0 is "Ice Cream Sandwich" (ICS), but it may as well have called it Godot, as the latest market figures yet again demonstrate.…
Telstra has nailed first mover advantage in the LTE market, with a new report forecasting that the carrier will reveal it has captured in excess of 500,000 subscribers in its full year results next week.…
Apple has recently been granted a patent for a Smart Cover with an integrated flexible display, that could show messages and media controls when connected to an iPad.
The current Smart Cover is Apple's screen protector for the iPad 2 and 3 that uses magnets to latch onto the tablet, and also automatically unlock the screen when you peel it open.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Geologists have published a paper that reveals Earth is absorbing around half of all human-related carbon emissions, despite levels continuing to rise.
The study, carried out by a team at the University of Colorado Boulder, compared C02 emission levels from 1960 to 2010 with the levels of carbon recorded in the Earth's atmosphere during the same period. The results, which made use of government data, show that the carbon uptake of Earth's oceans and vegetation has doubled, increasing by about 0.05 billion tonnes each year.
By: Liat Clark, Edited by: Duncan Geere
The Near Field Communications (NFC) Forum has defended its short-range radio tech, and blamed insecure apps that use the pay-by-tap tech for the security vulnerabilities revealed at the Black Hat conference last week.…
Facebook is still racking up false accounts even as it continues to try and flush out imposters on the dominant social network, which is seeing its value close to being halved on Wall Street.…
Google plans to rid its Android app store of malicious apps, obvious copycats and spam. Big changes to the Google Play developer policies mean that rogue apps will be booted from the shop in September.
In an email to Android developers -- picked up by Android Central -- Google says that its updated policy provides "more detail on the kinds of dangerous products that are not allowed on Google Play."
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Hundreds of UK-hosted websites and email accounts fell offline when a disk array failed at web biz Prime Hosting. As many as 860 customers are still waiting for a fix more than 48 hours after the storage unit went titsup.…
O2 launched the Pay & Go Pocket Hotspot today, a portable Wi-Fi hub for those on the move.…
A US appeals court has brought an InterDigital patent gripe against Nokia back to life today, three years after the International Trade Commission kicked it to the kerb.…
Indian government officials have apparently claimed that Research in Motion has handed over the skeleton keys used to encrypt BlackBerry communications – once again ignoring the fact that such keys don't exist.…
A Kickstarter project for an ambitious virtual reality headset has smashed its funding goal in one day, thanks to endorsements from some of the biggest names in gaming.
It's called Oculus Rift, and creator Palmer Luckey says it has a "wide field of view, high resolution display, and ultra-low latency head tracking". It plugs into a PC or a mobile device, and supposedly drops you right into the world of the game.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
A year ago we celebrated the booming startup culture with the cover line "Europe is on fire!" -- an unwise choice of words, it turned out (well, how were we to know that weeks later looters would engulf London in flames, and rioters would storm the banks in Athens?). So this time, we resolved to be more measured. Except... there really is an entrepreneurial revolution spreading across the continent. Last year we short-listed six capitals for our reporters to explore -- this year we had to raise that to ten.
By: David Rowan, Edited by: Ian Steadman
If you have shares in Facebook, you probably believe that this platform will sooner or later command a dominant share of the surging online-advertising market, estimated by MagnaGlobal to be worth $103 billion (£65 billion) by 2015.
It's a reasonable assumption, really. Advertising on the social web is an enticing prospect. A place where people tell you who they are, what they like, what they listen to, what they watch: in short, everything about everything. In 1960, if you had told Madison Avenue professionals that their spiritual heirs would have access to endless stores of detailed personal information on billions of people, they would have licked their chops. Or perhaps they would simply have wondered if the end of democracy was imminent.
By: Laurent Haug, Edited by: Ian Steadman
Chinese telecoms kit maker Huawei has said it is investigating claims by researchers that two of its router products contain serious vulnerabilities which could allow hackers to remotely take control of the devices.…
Showing the kind of optimism that only large analyst firms can muster, PriceWaterhouseCoopers has boldly predicted that 27 percent of Australians will have an IPTV service by 2016.…
Apple has said it will be filing an emergency motion of censure against Samsung after its Korean rival released information to the press that had been barred in court.…
The Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) has made two significant cloud-related announcements.…
Despite the US stating it plans to withdraw from Afghanistan by 2014, reports reveal it is looking to spend £28.5 million upgrading its army game training first-person shooter to feature, among other things, depictions of Arab and Afghan suicide bombers by 2013.
The US army's Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation (PEO STRI) has published a draft proposal for a game that would meet current industry standards and replace Bohemia Interactive's Virtual Battlespace 2 as its primary FPS training platform -- used to "develop, train, and evaluate the decision making processes for the individual leaders as well as enhance teamwork at all levels" -- reports Kotaku. Seven US-based companies have already expressed their interest in providing such a game, which would see the winning bidder receive £28.5 million over five years.
By: Liat Clark, Edited by: Olivia Solon
Facebook says it is investigating claims that bots are responsible for 80 percent of a company's advertising campaign clicks, but blames accusations that it tried to charge the same company for a page name change on a "miscommunication".
Online shopping platform provider Limited Run, formerly known as Limited Pressing, made the series of accusations in a post on its own Facebook page on 30 July, 2012. Since that time, the story has racked up 3,137 likes and Facebook, unable to ignore spiralling interest in the claims while its shares continue to tumble, publicly responded.
"We're currently investigating their claims," a spokesperson said. "For their issue with the page name change, there seems to be some sort of miscommunication. We do not charge pages to have their names changed. Our team is reaching out about this now."
By: Liat Clark, Edited by: Olivia Solon
Researchers from the University of Washington have found that the critically endangered bowhead whale has a wide catalogue of songs that more closely resembles that of songbirds, than other whales.
Oceanographer Kate Stafford left two underwater microphones on the seafloor off the east coast of Greenland, to find out if any bowhead whales passed through the Fram Strait.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
The loosely associated hacktivist "group" Anonymous has -- as expected -- declared war on the French retailer that tried to trademark the organisation's slogan and logo.
Earlier this year, online t-shirt and gifts company Early Flicker applied to the Insitut National De La Propriété Industrielle (INPI) trademark the famous "headless suit" and accompanying slogan: "Anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us." The company registered the trademark for a range of product categories, including clothing, handbags and accessories, and cooking utensils.
By: Olivia Solon, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Digg is back from the dead. Just six weeks after the site was purchased by New York-based incubator Betaworks, the news aggregator has been reborn with a new design, Facebook integration, and no comments.
Once a pioneer of the news aggregation space, the embattled Digg was sold to Betaworks for a reported $500,000 (£324,000) on 12 July. The investment group -- which focuses on social-media startups -- acquired Digg's name, technology and website.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Google has been ordered by France's Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) to hand over payload data retained on the company's system that its Street View spycars slurped from unsecured Wi-Fi networks.…
The prices that BT charged rivals to access parts of its network to provide services to their subscribers were not justified, the Court of Appeal has ruled.…
Pacific Fibre, a company formed to build a submarine cable linking the USA, New Zealand and Australia, has called it a day after failing to find the funds it needed to build the project.…
Leighton’s data centre subsidiary Metronode has opened its second wholesale data centre in Melbourne.…
To save time, battery life and processor cycles, smartphones don’t rely on “pure” GPS to fix their locations – they get help from location data in the mobile network. Research presented at Black Hat in Las Vegas last week cautions users that this represents a serious security vulnerability.…
