Narrabri Shire, population 14,000, target of elite hackers So: the person alleged to have described himself as the “leader” of LulzSec was arrested for what, exactly?…
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It's automation, but not as we know it, Jim Storagebod  There’s a lot of discussion about what EMC's ViPR is and what it isn’t. How much of this confusion is deliberate and how much is simply the normal of fog of war which pervades the storage industry?…
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Cash for gamers, ERP reviews and nuclear waste handling Australia's budget for 2013/2014 contains plenty of interest to the technology community.…
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Current funding deed to be its last The research house that gave the world the first provably secure operating kernel, and has been in the engine room of other IT application innovations in bionic vision, logistics, mapping and hundred-Terabit optical networking, is under threat under the 2013 Federal Budget.…
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Open Compute makers could do for Opterons what tier ones didn't For more than a few large-scale data center operators and supercomputer centers in the world, AMD's Opteron processors are still an important part of their infrastructure. But over the past few years, as Intel has got its Xeon act together and AMD has had some issues (to put it politely) the tier-one server makers have not exactly given Opteron a lot of love. Yet it may not matter all that much, now that the companies who are official suppliers of Open Compute iron can start peddling systems based on the "Roadrunner" Opteron motherboard.…
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Phones home with stats on startup, crashes, and more The Mozilla Foundation has shipped the latest version of its Firefox web browser with a new Health Report feature that monitors browser behavior and optionally submits usage statistics back to Mozilla to help reduce crashes and other problems.…
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Google boss asks for public's help to cure condition It has often been noted that Google's CEO Larry Page comes across as somewhat muted when speaking, which he took a break from entirely last year with an unexplained throat issue. Now he has revealed what the problem is.…
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For the right problem, quantum computing wins It's official, it seems: the D-Wave isn't a “real” quantum computer, but it does handle some classes of problems a lot faster than a classical desktop computer.…
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Teacup storm or Skype snooping? Is Microsoft “snooping” on Skype text conversations, or merely protecting users from malware URLs?…
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If you want to peddle boxes, you have to sell the ISVs first IBM is opening a Power Systems Linux Center in Beijing, China, in the hopes of getting more local ISVs interested in its Power Systems iron and luring them away from x86-based systems. With the Power Systems business taking it on the chin in IBM's first quarter – revenues fell 32 per cent compared to a year ago – you can bet that Big Blue is trying to light a fire under its Linux-on-Power efforts.…
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Only the Asian market showing growth It seems as though hardly a month goes by without the launch of some flashy new mobile phone. Yet according to new figures from Gartner, overall mobile sales are slowing throughout most of the world, which could mean trouble ahead for some vendors – particularly Nokia.…
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Killer robot takes to the skies The US Navy has successfully completed the first carrier launch of its unmanned X47B drone, a programmable stealth strike aircraft with a range of 2,100 miles and the skills to allow automatic in-flight refueling, which could give it global reach.…
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Encouraging compliance discourages responses More prescriptive regulation of the security posture in industry sectors like banking could have the paradoxical impact of reducing security, according to Andrew Dell, head of IT security services at the National Australia Bank.…
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Amazon cloud serves up biggest, Google second biggest, Microsoft...? Video services Netflix and YouTube consume nearly half of US internet capacity at peak times, demonstrating the massive scale of Amazon and Google's infrastructure clouds, but causing us to ask 'whither Microsoft?'…
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Freelancers, contractors and sole traders must now pay tax monthly, not quarterly Australia's 2013/2014 budget will mean extra work for IT contractors.…
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Cute game born in Jobsian heart of darkness Google has added a playable version of the early Atari game Breakout to its Image Search system to celebrate the game's 37th birthday.…
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Halves weakling instance prices, intros Riak support Oracle-backed Engine Yard has added support for PHP apps to its platform cloud as the company tries to maintain feature parity against bigger companies with better infrastructure.…
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Won't be 'Blue,' but will include important features We still don't know for sure what changes will arrive in Windows 8.1, the big OS update that's expected to ship as a preview in late June, but Microsoft has begun teasing a few details of the next update to Windows Phone 8.…
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Gov plans to probe tweets, chat, claims crypto guru Claims that a Saudi mobile network is attempting to spy on citizens emerged after the telco apparently tried to recruit top cryptographer Moxie Marlinspike - who promptly went public.…
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Wants damages from optical drive suppliers Dell has filed a lawsuit alleging that six suppliers which manufactured the optical drives used in its computers had illegally agreed to set the components' prices.…
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MIT and JSTOR allowed to black out names and network info A US judge has ordered that documents from the criminal hacking case against internet activist Aaron Swartz should be unsealed, after they've been redacted by MIT and JSTOR.…
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Nokia veep drills high-end master plan for El Reg Hands-on  Today, Nokia launched its best smartphone to date: the Lumia 925.…
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Might as well kick Korean mobe-maker where it'll hurt most Apple has ratcheted-up its patent-infringment attack on Samsung, asking the US District Court of California to add Sammy's new smartphone flagship, the Galaxy S 4, to the list of products that Apple alleges violate its patents.…
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Hey, rivals, have our loyal fans! No, wait BlackBerry's hugely popular social-network-in-hardware BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) will be available on iPhone and Android for free from this summer.…
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No, no, no need to thank us - we love you all Microsoft has confirmed that it will issue its Blue update to Windows 8 without charge, with first code scheduled at the company’s Build conference starting on June 26.…
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