· Indies celebrate Independence Day
Finding the sharing button
Interview Did anyone, I wonder, ever buy just one Motown single? Or just one 2-Tone single? And while you're pondering... can you even remember what major label your favourite artist is on? Unigram, perhaps. Or Polycorpse.â¦
· 2010: the 5TB 3.5in HDD cometh
Hitachi promises 1TB per square inch
Hitachi has pledged to release a 5TB 3.5in hard drive within two years, and it claims two of the drives will boast enough capacity to store everything in your brain.â¦
· PC World pips Asus to UK Atom sub-laptop premier
Who has the first SCC with Intel's new chip?
PC World today claimed to have beated Asus to the punch by launching the first Small, Cheap Computer in the UK equipped with an Intel Atom processor.â¦
· DARPA calls for 'DUDE' combo infra-nightscope
As in 'Dude, where's my multispectral imaging device?'
DARPA, the renowned bulgy-bonced battle-boffinry bureau (apparent motto: "If you can't beat them... well, some sort of murderous killer robot army would seem to be in order") has just issued its latest call for notions. This time, the Pentagon science chiefs want a new and ultra-puissant combo nightsight module.â¦
· Welcome back, WiReD!
Photoshoppers, pick up your brushes...
Competition More than a decade after it crashed and burned so spectacularly, WiReD - the house magazine for the Children of the Corn - is returning to the UK.⦠
· Apple drags its heels on iPhone security patches
Waiting for the second coming
Apple has failed to keep software for the iPhone up to date with patches available for its desktop PCs.â¦
· Serco sharpens the IT guillotine
Job cuts consultation underway
Government services firm Serco is looking to cut up to 500 jobs from its IT division, with satellite offices and its Birmingham HQ all likely to be hit.â¦
· Ofcom flashes cash guarantees at BT for fibre investment
Next gen network quid pro quo tabled
The boss of Ofcom has given the clearest indication yet that regulators are ready to offer BT more control over a next generation UK broadband infrastructure in exchange for investment.â¦
· Consider yourself Moderatrixed
And be damn grateful about it, worms
Well, I was actually hoping to spend this Friday performing my usual duties, perhaps enjoying a little light banter with my colleagues, and then sauntering out at lunchtime to get society-endangeringly drunk.â¦
· IPS finds no nuggets in ID checking goldmine
Claims targets exceeded, but fee income tiny
Government plans to position the Identity & Passport Service as the UK's de facto identity services broker seem not to have entirely caught the imagination of the private sector, figures in IPS' annual report and accounts suggest. Although IPS recruited 44 new customers for its Passport Validation Service (PVS), income from this for the year ending March 2008 was only £357,000.â¦
· MoD mega gov-IT project only mildly catastrophic - NAO
Military celebrate limited-disaster triumph
The UK Ministry of Defence has received some qualified praise for its ongoing, enormous effort to replace hundreds of different internal IT systems comprising scores of thousands of machines with a single integrated infrastructure.⦠
· Mystery over Verisign boss' shock exit
Like déjà vu all over again
Wall Street shut down for the long July 4 weekend pondering a puzzler. It emerged yesterday that Verisign CEO Bill Roper had suddenly quit the firm to be replaced by the firm's founder and chairman, Jim Bidzos.â¦
· TVonics MFR-300 micro digital TV set-top box
Bringing digital to Scart-free tellies
Review Thousands of Brits are going to find their analogue TVs incapable of picking up a signal come 2012. Clearly, that doesn't concern too many of us, since we're still buying plenty of analogue tellies.â¦
· David Davis tells El Reg that Labour is 'mesmerised' by tech
Liberties sacrificed for 'an illusion'
Interview As polling day approaches for the Howden and Haltemprice by-election, voters and observers are left with an eerie sense of déjà vu as Labour once again refuses to debate its civil liberties record with David Davis.â¦
· eBay Australia ditches PayPal scheme
Seller fury prompts backdown
eBay Australia has given up on its attempt to force virtually all payments through its subsidiary PayPal.â¦
· 'Anaconda' 200m rubber snake generator scheme gets funding
'Bulge' wave power - a hard one to swallow?
British professors have secured government research funding for their plans to generate energy using gigantic black rubber snake-like devices moored off the UK coasts.â¦
· Geldof backs Davis 'For Freedom' by-election
Banana republic, sceptic isle redux
Popstar turned humanitarian Bob Geldof has thrown his unkempt weight behind David Davis' by-election campaign.⦠
· Opera update fixes stability bugs
And mystery code injection flaw
Opera released an update to the latest version of its browser on Thursday.â¦
· Google deigns to comply with a privacy law
Corporate Rainmen avoid panic attack over word count
Google has finally added a link to its privacy (or lack thereof) policy on its homepage following pressure from privacy advocates.â¦
· Palm, BlackBerry-beating demand for 3G iPhone claims researcher
US consumers eye Apple smartphone
More than half of US consumers looking to buy a smartphone in the next three months will opt for Apple's 3G iPhone.â¦
· Microsoft gets hip with da yoof to flog email
Doing it for charidee
What could be more insincere than a bunch of marketing types concocting a fake blog to pimp their company's services by hitching them to worthy causes?â¦
· BSA slams EC's 'narrow-minded' interoperability vision
EIF 2.0 draft ruffles some proprietary software feathers
An open standards row is brewing between the EC and a lobbying group for software multinationals over a proposed European framework on interoperability â a draft of which is due to be published on 15 July.â¦
· MS readies Vista code injection risk fix
Redmond security gnomes get tough
Critical bug fixes are on the agenda for this month's monthly patch update from Microsoft.â¦
· Government waves cutlass at IT budget
Offshoring ahoy!
Treasury minister Yvette Cooper yesterday announced a plan to look for wide-ranging cost cuts in government budgets.â¦
· Oracle risks loss of influential BEA users
Free from Applications Unlimited
During its trumpeted webcast on plans for BEA Systems, Oracle's top brass stressed their commitment to middleware to keep the new flock happy. So it purchased BEA to expand Oracle's presence in Asia and Japan - that wasn't the point.â¦
· Solar-curtain "soft house" plan proposed by MIT prof
Soft buildings: require no foundation of hard facts
Architect Watch Heavens be praised* - the energy security/climate/fuel-price crisis has been solved by an MIT professor. Remarkably, not a professor of engineering or science either - but an architecture prof. Sheila Kennedy and her partner Frano Violich - assisted by other architects - have designed a "soft house" powered by "energy harvesting" solar-photovoltaic curtains.â¦
· Apple takes axe to MacBook Air SSD price
Overnight, £300 cheaper
Apple's MacBook Air - still the world's slimmest laptop; VoodooPC's Envy isn't shipping yet - just got cheaper. Well, sort of. Apple's knocked £300/$500 off the price of the solid-state drive model.â¦
· Would a data notification law improve UK data security?
How to prevent more government data disasters
A panel of experts in data protection was beaten yesterday by a simple question from the floor: "Can you give us an example of good data security practice by the British Government?"â¦
· Judge grants Viacom 12TB of YouTube user records
Google's privacy comeuppance
In the ongoing $1bn legal spat between Google and Viacom, a federal judge has ordered the search giant to turn over all existing records of every video viewed on YouTube. That includes user account names and IP addresses.â¦
· Nut launches death threats at Debian women
'You're killing freesource'
Exclusive Women working on Debian have been getting death threats from a nut job who believes they're killing free software.â¦
· EU still greasing IBM antitrust probe despite PSI withdrawal
'Your complaint stands'
IBM may have corked the wails of antitrust outrage coming from the diminutive mainframe vendor Platform Solutions (PSI) by purchasing the upstart, but the European regulator genie has already slipped out the bottle.â¦
· Strange cults, vocal surgery and the quiet man: Inside Microsoft
Mary-Jo Foley on life after Gates
Radio Reg Who'd have thought a bad haircut and rocking backwards and forwards in your chair like a child with ADD could pass as must-have traits? Yet, such was the cult of Bill Gates at Microsoft, company employees adopted these to become more like their boss.â¦
· Microsoft flogs subscriptions to the unwary and confused
Bad omens
Comment There's no such thing as a coincidence or a missed opportunity in the world of Microsoft, and this is no ordinary week.â¦
· 'HD TV gas' 17,000 times worse for planet than CO2, claims boffin
Nitrogen Trifluoride emissions balloon on flat-panel production
LCD TVs, praised as being greener than old-style tellies because they consume much less power, may actually be speeding climate change, a chemical expert has warned.â¦
· Are the ice caps melting?
Climate science's bipolar disorder
PBEM The headlines last week brought us terrifying news: The North Pole will be ice-free this summer "for the first time in human history," wrote Steve Connor in The Independent. Or so the experts at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado predict. This sounds very frightening, so let's look at the facts about polar sea ice.â¦
· Microsoft touts trustworthy browsing with IE8
If it asks if you'd like to see some puppies, just say no
Microsoft has detailed a raft of security improvements due to appear in Internet Explorer 8. The second beta of Redmond's web browser will be packed full of features designed to thwart phishing and drive-by download attacks, Redmond explained on Wednesday.â¦
· Wife-slaying Linux guru may have 'developmental disability'
Lawyers brand Hans Reiser 'mentally incompetent'
Lawyers for prominent Linux developer Hans Reiser, who was convicted of his wife's murder in April, have written to the trial judge this week to argue that their client may be mentally ill.â¦
· UK and US agree biometric heavily vetted trusted traveller deal
'Built on UK success' - have the yanks lost the plot?
The UK and US governments are to set up a fast-track scheme for trusted, frequent travellers between the two countries, immigration minister Liam Byrne announced today. So say goodbye to immigration blues? Not so fast - the agreement between the two countries only "sets out the shared determination to develop a swift channel across the two borders for trusted travellers", presumably meaning that it'll be a while yet.⦠
· The Moderatrix will see you now
Cue Aunt, cue Agony
Those among you who are still adrift on the sea of life - despite our resident Agony Aunt's best efforts to guide you to the shores of sanity - will be relieved to learn that the Moderatrix has once again opened the door of her basement boudoir to offer spiritual succour to the needy.â¦
· Transatlantic data sharing talks stumble over access to justice
Sharing is caring, says EU
High-level transatlantic talks on data sharing have hit a snag over EU citizens' right to defend their privacy in US court, the European Commission said in Brussels yesterday.â¦
· Linspire CEO defends Xandros buy-out
Hopes Linux will 'touch more people'
The CEO of Linux distributor Linspire has confirmed that rival desktop Linux maker Xandros Inc has acquired the firm.â¦
· Scareware runs amok on PlayStation site
Sony gamed by hackers
Gamers visiting the US Sony PlayStation website risk malware infection after the site was hit by hackers.â¦
· What powers a solar-powered snail, kids?
Dumb and dumber science exams
Boffins have slammed examiners in England for setting school children seriously dumb questions.â¦
· ISO certifies Adobe's PDF
Standard delivers, albeit at leisurely pace
The International Standardisation Organisation has ratified Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) as an official international standard, though it won't make PDF documents load any faster.â¦
· Firefox 3 makes up world record to set world record
Oh-oh, dedication download's what you need
The Mozilla Foundation has officially set a previously non-existent Guinness World Record for the largest number of software downloads in a day.â¦
· Brit carrier deals inked at last
We should be happy - but we aren't
Comment The UK media this morning is alive with "giant carrier" headlines, as the long-awaited contracts for the Royal Navy's new carriers are signed at last. In fact, as some news sources reported at the time, the deals were effectively confirmed six weeks ago, but today is the public announcement.â¦
· Pay-by-phone commerce coming closer
Talk, text and pay
The global trade body for the mobile industry and a European monetary organisation have signed a pact to speed up the deployment of handset payment services in Europe.â¦
· America wakes up to the surveillance society
Who watches the watchmen's mobile phone?
Civil liberties groups in the US are demanding that the Department of Justice cough details of its use of mobile phone tracking - particularly how often it's done so without probable cause of a crime being committed.â¦
· Built-in browser expiry proposed to fight botnet menace
45% fail to update surfing software, report finds
Nearly half (45.2 per cent) of all internet surfers neglect to regularly update their browser software. Slackness in applying updates in a timely fashion leaves an estimated 637 million surfers vulnerable to drive-by download attacks, according to a new survey.â¦
· Research: Wind power pricier, emits more CO2 than thought
'Windfarm output is never zero. Sometimes it's less'
Fresh contenders have entered the UK wind power debate, as a turbines expert funded by the Renewable Energy Foundation publishes an investigation into a hotly-disputed subject - the variability in output to be expected of a large UK windfarm base.â¦
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