As Australia races towards a federal election likely to kill off the country's current model for a national broadband network, the (probably) outgoing government has released a report saying the annual value of the network to households will be in the order of $AU3,800.

A remotely hosted log management company has garnered $10.5m in filthy valley lucre from Cisco, Data Collective Venture Capital, and others.

Bionym, a startup from the University of Toronto, is looking to banish password woes with a bracelet that handles authentication by monitoring your heartbeat.

The US Drug Enforcement Administration has enlisted telecom giant AT&T to develop a massive telephone records database that may put the National Security Agency's domestic phone surveillance to shame.

TechEd AustraliaHaving built numerous services over the top of what used to just be the World Wide Web, Facebook is now the established platform for plenty of applications. So it pretty much had to happen that someone would find a way to create services that clamber over The Social NetworkTM to subject it to some OTT pain.

VMware is working on courseware designed to download to and run on mobile phones, as a way of ensuring sysadmins in developing nations can get their hands on the knowledge they need to build virtualised data centres without having to acquire a ruinously expensive PC or leave the bandwidth-poor communities in which they live.

The Raspberry Pi revolution continues, with SolidRun joining the "very small computers for very small sums of money" movement with a bunch of community-supported versions of its CuBox-i miniature computers.

NASA has taken the wraps off its first NuStar data releases, releasing data collected by the X-ray observatory in July and August 2012.

French booze watchdogs have warned Apple that its decision to flog a blinged-up "champagne gold" version of the iPhone could end in a nasty court battle.

Citadel, the aggressive botnet at the heart of a widely criticised takedown by Microsoft back in June, is back and stealing banking credentials from Japanese users, according to Trend Micro.

Microsoft has decided to extend the life of its TechNet service for 90 days, but will still kill the popular service and suggest subscribers migrate to the more expensive MSDN.

The mega-markets of China and India, and more broadly the rest of the Asia Pacific region, will be key to Microsoft’s success in the handset space with its newly acquired Nokia assets, according to analyst IDC.

Designers of a parody T-shirt mocking the NSA launched a successful crowdfunding campaign after being denied permission to sell it through custom goods marketplace Zazzle.

AnalysisThere has been much sniggering into sleeves after wags found they could upset iOS 6 iPhones and iPads, and Macs running OS X 10.8, by sending a simple rogue text message or email.

Wireless technology specialist CSR has come up with the world's thinnest touch keyboard, which is less than 0.5mm thick.

Three doctors face the withdrawal or suspension of their licences to practise medicine after being accused of releasing an iPhone app which allegedly plagiarised material from an award-winning medical textbook.

Anniversary reviewThe recent El Reg feature on the Compact Cassette's 50th birthday had many a reader commenting on some of the format's former glories. Names mentioned among the dewy-eyed included Aiwa (a favourite in UK studios) and the audiophiles’ choice, Nakamichi, with both producing state-of-the-art recorders with three heads and a lot more besides.

The word on the street is that a backlash from Microsoft's top tier enterprise partners has forced its incentive architects to revisit pending compensation reforms a month before they are due to be implemented.

Dell continues to insist that founder Big Mike's offer to take the firm private is what's best for it, announcing today that proxy advisory firms Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), Glass Lewis and Egan Jones are all recommending it.

Eleven years on from the commencement of work on the first version of the telly connectivity standard, the minds behind the High Definition Multimedia Interface – HDMI to you and me – have taken the wraps off release 2.0 a year later than originally anticipated.

UK mobile network Three has been rapped for touting a tablet computer that customers couldn't actually buy – and then, having got the interested punters on the phone, tried flogging them a more expensive slab instead.

Twitter has been cast back into the dark ages of 2006 after a number of useful functions disappeared from its website without warning or explanation.

British politicians triggered grumble-flick website filters within the Houses of Parliament more than 300,000 times in the past year.

Barnes & Noble has knocked a further 20 quid off the price of its Nook HD and HD+ tablets as it continues to try to shift existing stocks of the gadgets.

Blocks and FilesUncertainty abounds at Dell's Texas HQ as Michael Dell struggles to take the company private. Sources keep whispering that there's a "plan" in the offing – but what is that plan?

It's all go at the Special Projects Bureau's mountaintop headquarters as we await the imminent delivery of our Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) Vulture 2 spaceplane, currently being hewn from the living nylon down at 3T RPD Ltd.

Japanese camera firm Olympus will be prosecuted by the UK's Serious Fraud Office along with its British subsidiary Gyrus Group following a £1bn accounting scandal at the company.

The man brought in to steer the government's crisis-hit one-dole-to-rule-them-all IT system has admitted that the Department for Work and Pension's Universal Credit project has been poorly managed and needs to be completely overhauled.

Dance music empire the Ministry of Sound is suing music streaming service Spotify to protect the value of its compilation albums, in an unusual test case of European intellectual property law.

Xbox buffs can get their mitts on Microsoft’s new console, the One, on 22 November - eight years on from the Xbox 360’s arrival in the US. The console went into “full production” this week, Microsoft claimed today.

LinkedIn says it will sell off an extra $1bn worth of stock to raise funds to buy new systems, tout better services and potentially snap up other firms.

StoragebodEMC has done it again and managed to turn what could have been an interesting product refresh into something that just irritates me and many others.

UK net regulator Ofcom has published an idiots' guide to traffic shaping to try to encourage people to see how wonderful it is ahead of the inevitable battle over net neutrality.

The UK Border Force's inefficient use of technology is one reason it's failing to carry out enough customs checks or detections of illegal immigrants, according to the National Audit Office.

The service blackout at third-party Microsoft Exchange hosting biz Intermedia was caused by glitches in core routing kit, the CEO has confirmed.

With the launch of the "Avoton" Atom C2000 server chips, Intel is putting its second-generation of 64-bit, server-class Atom processors into the field - and what is arguably the first such Atom that is truly designed for modern server workloads.

The retired NASA chief who sent the first American astronaut into space has said the agency should give up on Mars and focus on putting another astronaut on the Moon.

PicsFears that an explosive fire at SK Hynix's Chinese fabs in Wuxi will cause a spike in chip prices are unfounded, says the company.

Internet mogul Kim Dotcom has stepped down from his position as managing director of file-sharing site Mega to focus on his legal battles and his political ambitions.

When Shadow Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull led the Australian Republican movement, which found itself on the wrong end of the 1999 plebiscite on converting Australia from a constitutional monarchy to a republic, he labelled then-Prime Minister and staunch monarchist John Howard the man who “broke this nation's heart.”

Amazon has broadened its set of services for storing frequently accessed data, just one day after Microsoft announced a competing product.

The "Avoton" Atoms for servers and storage arrays and their "Rangeley" variants for networking devices are out and Intel is ramping up the features and carving up the SKUs to try to chase the low end of servers, storage, and networking to take some business away from other chip makers.

More details have begun to trickle out regarding Microsoft's second-generation Surface fondleslabs, which are expected to ship in the fall.

At the "Avoton" Atom C2000 chip launch on Wednesday in San Francisco, Intel showed off several of the components of its Rack Scale Architecture working in concert and also announced a partnership with Microsoft to push the idea on its Windows platforms for data centers and on the Windows Azure public cloud.

Packetloop, a two-year-old Australian security analytics outfit whose claim to fame is a threat engine that can visualise terabytes of packet captures, has been slurped by US-based Arbor Networks.