Flash your bits to take firmware off the wrist Sony has opened the code for its SmartWatch and will allow developers to write their own firmware for the Android-powered device.…
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Zombie lawsuit back and wants to suck the brains out of Linux IBM's lawsuit with SCO over just who owns Unix has crawled out of the grave and seems set to shuffle back into US courts.…
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French startup hopes to market in 2014 “Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good” seems to be the motto of a French startup that believes it has a good-enough approach to adding solar charging to smartphones.…
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Did we say we were only doing vanilla hosting until now? No? Sorry. Rackspace has commenced offering its elastic cloud products in Australia.…
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So long, Oracle! Don't let the door hit you on the way out In a surprise move, Red Hat has announced that version 7 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) will ship with the MariaDB database installed by default, in place of MySQL.…
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Secret event scooped by Scottish developer? Facebook has sent out invitations for a press event on June 20, and it's widely rumored to be the announcement of a new RSS reader aimed at scooping up disaffected Google Reader users.…
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If the Oxford English Dictionary says it is so, then it is so Proving either – or both – that the English language is a living organism in constant flux and evolution, or that the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary is cheapening itself with a premature bow to cultural pressure, the word "tweet" in its social-media sense has been added to that sacred paragon of lexicography.…
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Procurement report reveals tech gap in cloud cold war The CIA picked Amazon over IBM for a lucrative government contract not because of price, but because of the company's "superior technical solution" – a view that contrasts with IBM's vision of itself as the go-to tech organization for governments.…
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Hoovering a cloud of sand 7.5 billion miles from a tiny star NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has spotted what appears to be a baby planet sweeping up matter from a protoplanetary disk orbiting a red dwarf star some 176 light-years away from Earth.…
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And yes, most are remotely exploitable Thought your Java security woes were behind you? Think again. Oracle is planning to release a Critical Patch Update on Tuesday that affects multiple versions of Java, and it's another doozy.…
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Azure and Android backends caught in push notification love-in Microsoft is giving all Azure fiddlers a free 20MB database as part of a suite of improvements to the Azure cloud designed to tempt in mobile app developers.…
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Plans radical slim-down of ad options Facebook has confirmed that it will drop the sale of Sponsored Results in its search pages, a "feature" that plenty of El Reg readers have been less than happy about.…
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It's all perfectly legal, trust us The slides leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden named nine companies that allegedly share data with US intelligence agencies, but according to a new report, the actual number of firms that collaborate with US spies may be much larger. Try thousands of them.…
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Tests show equal performance while sipping significantly less juice The industry analysts at ABI Research pitted a Lenovo smartphone based on Intel's Atom-based Clover Trail+ platform against a quartet of ARM-based systems, and Chipzilla's system not only kept pace with the best of them, but did so using less power.…
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The old 1 + 1 = 3 approach In a "resounding validation" of the CloudFoundry technology, CenturyLink has acquired platform-as-a-service minnow AppFog.…
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Sprint/Softbank merger hire suggests Japanese will play ball T-Mobile and Verizon were not issued court orders to hand over mobile data for their users because their part-ownership by non-US companies could have caused complications, according to an unnamed US official.…
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Bennett follows through with middle-management cull promise Up to 1,700 workers at Symantec face the axe over the next six weeks as the consequences of a corporate restructuring plan announced in January begin to bite, according to a recent report.…
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Too late to save the business, though The founder and former owner of telco integrator QiComm has been acquitted of money-laundering charges brought by HMRC - but said this came too late in the day to keep his biz afloat.…
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I have measured out my life in espresso spoons
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Britain still makes stuff, it's just not real any more... Jaguar Land Rover has promised to return car manufacturing to Britain, although it will only be simulating cars rather than building them.…
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You probably have one in your pocket Whistleblower Edward Snowden apparently used a USB thumb-drive to smuggle out hundreds of top-secret documents before he blew the lid off the NSA's web-spying project PRISM. This is despite the Pentagon's clampdown on the gadgets.…
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Word, Excel, Powerpoint for your pocket-stroker Microsoft's Office 365 app is now available from Apple's iTunes store for iPhones, iPads and iPods.…
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Report: 'Highly contrived' structure has damaged HMRC's reputation British MPs have demanded that the government act to revamp the tax structure after damning revelations about Google's corporate payments structure in the country.…
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Port authority Apple WWDC  If the word from the Apple WWDC is to be believed, we’re just months away from hooking up all our peripherals using Thunderbolt 2 cables. Funny that, as I thought this was supposed to happen when the original Thunderbolt ports appeared on Macs back in 2011.…
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The only good mobe is a dead mobe US law enforcement is calling for a mandatory kill switch on all mobiles, enabling the shut down of stolen phones in the hope of rendering them worthless.…
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