Maintaining an awareness of sensory cues in the vicinity has just been patented by Apple – for portable electronic devices, anyway.

Buying stuff online should be so fast and fun that it resembles the experience offered by first-person shooters, in which as soon as one acquires a tool it is possible to start using it.

Adobe published a critical Flash Player update on Tuesday to fix three exploits, two of which are under active attack by hackers.

Revolution Analytics, the commercializer of the open source R statistical analysis programming language with proprietary extensions that are closed source, has come up with a bunch of ways to integrate the Hadoop big data muncher with R. And it is testing the integration of its R Enterprise ScaleR predicative algorithms in conjunction with Yahoo! spinoff Hortonworks, one of the big five – er, now six, including Intel – Hadoop disties.

RSA 2013Computer programmers outsourcing their own jobs and pocketing the profit from salary differentials overseas is much more common than first thought.

A hitherto little-known company called Maz Technologies has taken aim at seven major vendors, filing lawsuits claiming that they infringe its security patents.

MWC 2013One of the things mobile network operators complain about most is how they have to invest in infrastructure while over the top (OTT) players are making all the money. So it takes a brave man to take part in a keynote when he’s one of those OTT pariahs. At the “Future of Communication” keynote that man was Talmon Marco, co-founder of Viber. He took to the stage with Deutsche Telekom CEO René Obermann, Ericsson boss Hans Vestberg and Suk-Chae Lee from Korea Telcom.

Not content with worming their way into every aspect of daily life, a new Indian social network has decided to do the same for the afterlife.

“Time? They ain’t making any more of it, so you gotta get in and get out, or you’ll get your f*****g face ripped off,” screamed an old Chicago Merc floor trader at my grad school class during a field trip.

Google has called on the EU's highest court to uphold its right to display links to published "valid legal material" in the face of calls from Spain's data protection authority to remove links on the grounds of privacy.

MWC 2013A top Euro politician has urged Europeans to get cracking on rolling out 5G networks after falling behind Asia and America in adopting 4G.

One-trick software pony Commvault has finally pushed out a raft of updates with Simpana version 10.0 in the hopes of broadening its user base in the biz data backup, archive and search game.

The inventor who co-founded visual PIN company GrIDsure has become involved with another pattern-based authentication start-up in the hopes that the shoulder-surfer proof technology could replace two-factor authentication.

Supercomputer storage firm DataDirect Networks (DDN) has brought out a scale-out Hadoop storage array, the hScaler, to both ingest and digest Big Data using Hadoop, combining compute and storage in one platform.

LSE-listed Northamber blamed the economy and cost-cutting on the part of IT vendors for a massive slide in sales and the return to losses at the halfway stage in its fiscal 2013.

InterviewNokia has a radical strategy to outflank some of the world’s biggest technology companies, including Google, and it shared some of the details with El Reg in Barcelona this week.

Google has patched a flaw that allowed attackers to circumvent the web giant's two-factor login system and hijack victims' accounts.

PayPal co-founder Max Levchin has launched his new payments startup, Affirm, to fight it out in the rapidly expanding arena of mobile payments.

MWC 2013Unlike digestive biscuits, mobile phones do not react well to being dunked. With perhaps this in mind, two companies at Mobile World Congress claim to have the best technologies for treating phones to make them waterproof.

Product Round-upHow we all laughed when Samsung launched the Galaxy Note toward the end of 2011. Who could possibly want a phone with a 5.3-inch screen? It turned out rather a lot of people did, and the unqualified success of the 4.8-inch Galaxy S III and 5.6-inch Galaxy Note 2 proved that what many punters want is a phone with a really, really, really big screen. A tablet and phone in one, in other words.

Walk into any of Apple’s 400 shops, pick up an accessory, boxed software or any one of the other items the Mac maker’s stylish emporia have out on shelves, and, if you have an Apple ID and an iPhone, you can buy the products you want without having to interact with one of the firm’s happy-clappy minions.

It seems software-defined storage is the storage world's "cloud", and Nexenta is bang on trend. The ZFS storage array software firm's CEO, Evan Powell, is now stepping aside to become chief strategy officer in the wake of a fourth funding round of $24m, and investors must be hoping the appointment of a seasoned CEO will take the company forward to the hoped-for IPO.

"Dotcom dinosaur" and Whitehall's digerati darling Martha Lane Fox CBE has been made a crossbench peer in the House of Lords.

Spooks and soldiers will get iPhones and Android kit after the top brass promised to open up its top-secret communication networks to handsets beyond BlackBerrys.

The Twitter feed of news agency AFP's photo department was hacked yesterday, apparently by supporters of embattled Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad.

Shanghai hackers APT1 - outed this month in a high-profile report that linked them to the Chinese military - may not be China's top cyber-espionage team despite its moniker. Security experts say the team is more prolific than leet.

One month after lifting the curtain on the updated version of its Office 365 subscription service for home users, Microsoft has officially launched the equivalent service for business customers with three new offers for small and midsized companies.

Small biz security specialist AVG has run its first Partner Advisory Council (PAC) in the UK after admitting it needs to brush up on channel comms, particularly in light of partners who are moving exclusively to the cloud.

MWC 2013Israeli gesture tech specialist EyeSight is in Barcelona demonstrating how one finger can take control of a phone, TV or computer without so much as a caress, using the already-present camera.

Astroboffins have figured out where the Chelaybinsk meteorite came from using the power of maths and videos shot by witnesses in Russia.

CommentIn computing there are many, many different ways to run down other people’s work, not the least of which is: “OK, so they removed the bottleneck, but only by throwing faster hardware at it.”

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Miscreants affiliated with hacking collective Anonymous have dumped online a huge cache of data supposedly lifted from insecure systems at a Bank of America contractor.

Apple has lost a bid to reduce its $368m damages bill owed after its video-call service FaceTime infringed VirnetX's VPN patents.

If you are going to take on Amazon Web Services, like Rackspace Hosting is doing with its eponymous cloud, then you'll need a lot more than raw infrastructure services. Rackspace requires various platform services, and it also needs the expertise to run them.

Website administration firm cPanel has told The Reg that one of its proxy servers was hacked, potentially exposing customers' administrator-level passwords.

Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider Apprenda has come up with a way to morph single-tenant Java applications into multi-tenant hydras without developers having to do much legwork.

A new strain of malware designed to spy on multiple government entities and institutions across the world has been discovered by anti-virus firm Kaspersky Lab.

MWC 2013Samsung has unveiled a developer preview of its upcoming Wallet app, and to say that it was inspired by Apple's iOS Passbook app may be a gross understatement.

Panzura's global cloud-storage controller has been cleared to handle restricted data, which should make it easier for the US government to move to private clouds and get rid of IT staff.

Sales and shipments of servers are both approaching levels seen in the run-up ahead of the Great Recession in late 2007.

The Mozilla Foundation doesn't expect the first phones running its Firefox OS to appear until this summer – and even then, only in select markets – but developers can start tinkering with the platform on real hardware today, thanks to Sony Mobile.

As Australians turn from freetards into digital music buyers, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) (IPFI) and Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) have responded by bleating that the National Broadband Network will destroy them unless the government revises copyright law in their favour.

UpdatedApple, Facebook, Intel, Google, Oracle, Cisco, Verizon, eBay, and Qualcomm are among at least 60 top US companies that will file a brief with the US Supreme Court in support of the plaintiffs in a case that seeks to invalidate as unconstitutional laws banning same-sex marriages.

Ubuntu Linux maintainer Canonical has canceled its semiannual Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) conferences in favor of a new, more-frequent series of events to be conducted online only.

Reports that Canada has just awakened to the perils of BlackBerry PIN-to-PIN messaging in government should be taken with a pinch of salt – the nation knew about the problem back in 2011.

RSA 2013Device manufacturers who are sticking internet connections into everything from TVs to toasters need to lock down their systems with strong authentication, Google's chief internet evangelist Vint Cerf warned the RSA keynote audience.