Akamai's latest State or the Internet report shows that the US is making little headway in becoming a top-ranked broadband nation, and is being outpaced by Asia and Europe based on traffic analysis from the first quarter of the year.

Apple surprised Wall Street on Tuesday when it announced that it had sold more iPhones than most forecasters had envisioned. What it didn't say in its earnings release, however, was how many of those 31.2 million iPhones it sold in its third fiscal quarter were iPhone 5s, and how many were lower-priced, older models.

The US government has created "an always expanding, omnipresent surveillance state," according to Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), and if something isn't done, it may soon become impossible to dismantle.

The defense industry already accounts for somewhere between 10 and 15 per cent of Nvidia's Tesla GPU coprocessor sales and is a big chunk of the sales of Quadro high-end graphics cards, as well. And Sumit Gupta, general manager of the Tesla Accelerated Computing business unit at the company, says that there is a lot more business to be had in the geospatial intelligence market – GeoInt in defensespeak –­ and the company will be working with partners to chase those dollars.

The Darwinian derby to determine which RSS-reading service would replace Google Reader as the world's dominant feed-wrangler may just have produced its first extinction event, after theoldreader.com choked on its recently-enlarged database and crashed.

A company established last year to negotiate royalties from patents filed by previously low-profile individuals from Cincinnati has vaulted into public eye courtesy of Google, which has bought rights to two of its patents.

New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), which illegally spied on resident Kim Dotcom, is on the cusp of gaining sweeping new powers that include wiretapping NZ citizens.

A group of researchers led by a Monash Univeristy PhD student has demonstrated an all-optical technique for dealing with nonlinearity – something that considerably boosts the throughput of an optical system.

The finest specialists in British archaeology have confessed themselves baffled by the mysterious case of the dead 19th-century Pacific walrus found buried in a London graveyard.

After months of big bets on open source and cloud computing technologies, IBM just can't stay away from the gambling table, and on Wednesday came back to slam down a ton of chips on Cloud Foundry, a platform cloud technology developed by VMware spinoff Pivotal.

In early 2006, miners drilling a new natural gas well in the Indonesian district of Porong struck a problem. Not far from their workings and not long after they did some drilling, hot mud started bubbling to the surface.

Asian telcos came out top in a new global study of the prepaid mobile market by KPMG designed to find the best customer experience in-store and over-the-phone, with the UK, US and Australia all placing disappointingly outside the top ten.

Hard on the heels of yesterday's discussion of high-performance computing with the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research and the National Computational Infrastructure comes the announcement that real data has started to stream out of Western Australia's Murchison Widefield Array.

Can ViPR - EMC's virtual data management package - really aggregate logical storage units across different devices?

People often think that the big city is a dangerous place: they worry that they might get murdered, for instance. Being killed on purpose is more likely in town, according to new research, but it is so rare compared to dying in an accident of some type that in fact you would be much more likely to die unexpectedly in the countryside - in America, anyway.

Quatermass at 60“When I wrote the Quatermass stories, I couldn’t help drawing on the forces and the fears that affected people in the 1950s,” wrote Quatermass creator Nigel Kneale in 1996.

Blocks and FilesSamsung and Micron have announced NVMe-compatible PCIe flash storage cards - and now hardware from WD subsidiary HGST has been certified as conformant to the specification.

ReviewI currently use a cheap - 10 quid from eBay - Cisco four-port 10/100Mbps switch to feed the various devices in my living room that require a wired Ethernet connection to the network. The switch connects to the router, which happens to be one floor up and at the other end of my flat, by way of a 500Mbps powerline link.

There are at least 40 per cent more companies that make up the UK's "digital economy" than any Government estimates, and those companies tend to be considerably more successful than non-digital companies, researchers have found.

Dell shareholders are set to meet in Texas again today to see whether they can agree to go with Big Mike's plan to take the firm private or prefer to wait for a better offer.

Podcast

Game TheoryWith the heatwave apparently set to give way to stormy weather, it might be about time to batten down the hatches and get comfy with a new game. This week we’re off for a walk in the forest with Pikmin 3, tracking down a master thief in The Raven and getting overwhelmed by choice in Valve’s Dota 2.

Virgin Media plans to get mobile operators to pay for free Birmingham-wide Wi-Fi in a deal which could see every traffic light in the city turned unto a 4G cell base station.

Hacker gang the Syrian Electronic Army broke into the systems of Viber, the popular mobile chat service, and dumped its user account records online.

UK homeware retailer Lakeland is asking its customers to change their passwords as a precaution following a hack attack that allowed cybercrooks to reach two of its encrypted databases.

UpdatedSince the start of this year it has become clear that the UK government has shifted from a hands-off approach to censoring content online by leaving ISPs to work out an agreed code that would prevent regulatory intervention.

Unionised Capita IT Services (ITS) workers are staging a one-day strike over pay on Friday. Unite reckons the industrial action could impact customers including Deutsche Bank and Prudential.

The US House of Representatives will vote today on axing funding for controversial eavesdropping projects run by the NSA and other spooks.

Brown University boffins reckon that some Martian valleys could have been carved by snowfall - rather than rivers running across the Red Planet's surface.

A system of police cameras that slurped the comings and goings of Brits living and working in the small Hertfordshire town of Royston has been found to be "unlawful" for collecting "excessive" information, the UK's data watchdog ruled today.

The US Department of Defense has estimated at $3.5bn the costs of clearing military ops out of 25MHz of radio spectrum to make way for mobe operators – except it doesn't want to march off entirely, demanding instead that the band's new owners share nicely.

A man seemingly familiar to millions as Apple's tetchy tech tycoon Steve Jobs will star in adverts for cheap Chinese computers from Lenovo, according to reports.

A campaign to get a fat, "creepy", and apparently over-aged bloke to win a contest to have his picture snapped backstage with country music popstrel Taylor Swift has backfired.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is free to leave his Tom-Hanks-in-The-Terminal* style life behind after getting a pass to exit the transit zone of Russia's Sheremetyevo Airport.

EE has signed up 687,000 4G customers, and is in track to hit a million by year's end, but average revenue per user (ARPU) and total customer numbers are both a shade down as its 4G monopoly comes to an end.

EMC did the business in its second calendar 2013 quarter, notching up solid gains in revenues and profits. Revenue was propped up by brisk trade in cloud virtualisation services from VMware and sales of scale-out NAS storage from its Isilon unit. The RSA and Information Intelligences groups slowed EMC down a smidge, however.

Google has been showing off its new Nexus 7 fondleslab running the latest version of Android, including a 4G LTE version that's the first hardware to allow 4G reception from a variety of competing carriers.

Microsoft and Azul Systems have hoisted the open source Java implementation OpenJDK onto the Redmond's Azure cloud, giving developers access to the language on Azure's Windows-based cloud services.

Google's revamped Nexus 7 fondleslab is the first device to ship with Android 4.3, but other devices will be receiving the update over the air soon and owners of Google's flagship Nexus kit can already download system images.

Last year, the world noticed with more than a little trepidation that China was hoarding rare earths.

Amazon and IBM's tussle for a multi-million dollar government cloud contract has moved to DEFCON 3 when Amazon challenged the CIA's decision to take another look at the two companies' bids.

It is always best to bow out at the top, but Juniper Networks' CEO has decided to stand down well before the company is close to peaking. At least, that's what investors will be hoping.

Facebook posted strong results for the second quarter of its fiscal 2013 on Wednesday, showing impressive growth in its advertising and payments businesses and earnings that soundly beat analysts' expectations.

Does the OpenStack cloud controller need to support the full set of APIs from Amazon Web Services and other public clouds? Randy Bias, the founder and CTO of OpenStack distie Cloudscaling thinks so.