Boffins find 'scary radio attack'* against pacemakers
*Attack is actually 'very difficult in real world'
It's a little difficult to credit as a discovery the fact that analogue receivers – whether they be on a bluetooth device or a pacemaker – are vulnerable to radio interference.
That, however, is what's going to be presented at an IEEE conference later this week. Here's an excerpt of a story from America's Institution of …
Optus outlines its 4G future
Canberra first for TD-LTE rollout
Optus is hoping to shed its bridesmaid status, unveiling plans for a major rollout across four frequency bands, announcing its first TD-LTE deployment, and adding a bunch of cities and regional centres to its rollout.
Managing director of Optus Networks Guenther Ottendorfer told a press conference today that the aim is to use …
Hold our tiny silicon spheres, say gravity wave detection scientists
Nano-sensors in optical trap for more sensitive instrument
A group of scientists from the University of Nevada at Reno says tiny sensors – small enough to be suspended in an optical trap – could pave the way for a new kind of ultra-sensitive gravity wave sensor.
That is, of course, if gravity waves exist: predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity, gravity waves have proven …
Four Anons cuffed in Italy
Postal Police go postal
Four individuals accused of being members of Anonymous and participating in “Operation Tango Down” have been arrested in Italy.
According to AFP, the four are being accused of various attacks in Italy, including a DDoS against the Vatican and the parliamentary Website.
The Postal Police – responsible for enforcement of …
IBM gives a cloudy outlook for COBOL
Zombie language gets XML, Java support
IBM is giving its COBOL environment a cloudy flavour with an update to the ancient venerable and unkillable language.
To the cool kids, COBOL probably looks like a zombie, complete with loose bits of decaying flesh. However it still accounts for a vast amount of operational enterprise code that's too expensive to replace all in …
I know identity of Bitcoin's SECRET mastermind, says Ted Nelson
Coiner of 'hypertext' claims to identify the links
Sociologist, philosopher, computer industry pioneer and inventor of the term “hypertext” Ted Nelson is claiming that he knows the identity of Bitcoin inventor “Satoshi Nakamoto”.
In a rambling – and, let's face it, odd – 12-minute post on YouTube, Nelson spins out the suspense, throws in a dialogue with himself as Sherlock …
TUANZ: don't risk mobile competition
New Zealand plots spectrum future
New Zealand has kicked off the consultation period for its planned 700 MHz spectrum auction, to take place in 2013.
That country's Radio Spectrum Management Agency has adopted the Asia Pacific Telecommunity (APT) band plan, in which 45 MHz of paired spectrum will be made available in nine 5 MHz blocks.
The government is hoping …
Hemp used to make graphene-like supercapacitors
Pass de battery on de left-hand-side
A group of scientists from the University of Alberta have created a process that makes graphene-like nanomaterials out of hemp waste, suitable for use in supercapacitors.
While graphene is already known to be a good energy store, it's also expensive, so commercial supercapacitors use activated carbon electrodes.
According to a …
Australia downloads a limping 13 Mbps, says Ookla
Looking under the data, it's not so simple
There are, it seems, 44 countries in the world with better broadband download speeds than Australia, according to the latest Netindex release by Ookla.
This has brought a predictable round of soul-searching, particularly as Mongolia appears higher on the list than Australia (it scored an average speed of 13.79 Mbps, while …
'LulzSec leader's' victim named: tiny Oz council
Narrabri Shire, population 14,000, target of elite hackers
So: the person alleged to have described himself as the “leader” of LulzSec was arrested for what, exactly?
There's been a lot of noise flowing around, and the odd tip-off (including some to The Register in an extensive phone call on April 29). Since we try to avoid jumping ahead of the court process, we have kept our traps shut …
NICTA on the budget chopping block
Updated Current funding deed to be its last
The research house that gave the world the first provably secure operating kernel, and has been in the engine room of other IT application innovations in bionic vision, logistics, mapping and hundred-Terabit optical networking, is under threat under the 2013 Federal Budget.
Funding for NICTA, funded through the Department of …
D-Wave wins the quantum-classical horse race, kind of
For the right problem, quantum computing wins
It's official, it seems: the D-Wave isn't a “real” quantum computer, but it does handle some classes of problems a lot faster than a classical desktop computer.
That's the result of the first attempt to benchmark the company's adibiatic quantum computer, but it comes with caveats.
But first, some background. D-Wave is a …
German publisher accuses Microsoft of URL sniffing
Teacup storm or Skype snooping?
Is Microsoft “snooping” on Skype text conversations, or merely protecting users from malware URLs?
German publisher Heise Online has given that question prominence with the accusation that Redmond is snooping, as the result of receiving return visits from Microsoft IP addresses if they send HTTPS URLs through Skype text chats. …
Too much infosec regulation undermines security, warns NAB
Encouraging compliance discourages responses
More prescriptive regulation of the security posture in industry sectors like banking could have the paradoxical impact of reducing security, according to Andrew Dell, head of IT security services at the National Australia Bank.
“We have to become much more agile and proactive – how we look at, how we react to cybercrime. Our …
Seven Media mulls IPTV service
Sees NBN as enabler for 2014 launch
Having effectively killed off TiVo in Australia, TV broadcaster Seven West Media is considering its IPTV options, telling investors it has plans to create a “broadcast to broadband” operation in 2014.
While Australia's free-to-air broadcasters have embraced the Internet for program catch-ups, they have mostly responded to the …
NBN Co hoses down 'scary Russian crackers' report
Nothing here to see, move along
NBN Co, the company building Australia's National Broadband Network, has found itself having to refute reports in the finance press that its networks had been “penetrated” by “cyber gangs”.
While attacks and scans are the lot of any and every network administrator, the company says the reported Trojan infections never got past a …
Samsung sends gigabit '5G' signal TWO WHOLE KILOMETRES
Marketecture wars Forget 5G, this is a grab for influence over future standards
The world is getting excited at the advent of “5G” wireless systems with a demonstration of a gigabit air interface using the 28 GHz band by Samsung.
It's not too bad as a piece of early-stage academic technology demonstration, as it happens: the engineers used 64 antenna elements in what you might think of as a “massively MIMO …
Japan begins planning exascale super
Seeking funds for design project
Japan is plotting its return to global supercomputing dominance, with its science ministry seekings funds to design the successor to its K supercomputer, to be completed by 2020.
According to The Asahi Shumbun, the new project aims to create a super with 100 times the processing capacity of the Fujitsu-Riken Research Institute- …
On the hunt for a new ampere
Counting charge one electron at a time
While there's been lots of attention paid to the search for a new kilogram, another of the SI system's fundamental units of measurement is under examination: the ampere.
Along with the kilogram, metre, second, Kelvin, mole and candela, the ampere is one of the fundamental yardsticks used to measure the world around us. And, like …
Open source cellular targets rural comms
Linux and Asterisk for cellular networks
Start-up RangeNetworks is hoping that the combination of low cost and transparent software will allow it to break into the notoriously locked-down cellular network market.
Mobile network infrastructure is traditionally the preserve either of either established vendors (think Ericsson or Alcatel-Lucent), or well-backed new …
Fibre system capacity doubled in university study
All you need is a little bit of maths
Today's optical fibre systems have twice the theoretical capacity currently attributed to them, according to research from the University of Tel Aviv.
The study, published on Arxiv, is part of the widespread academic interest in studying the channel capacity of fibre optic systems. Over long distances, and particular where …
Aryaka adds mobile admin to WANOP kit
Cloudy net stats on your fondleslab
WAN-optimisation-in-the-cloud provider Aryaka has added mobile portal access to its network.
Unleashed on the world at Interop, the MyAryaka portal has a simple enough proposition: since systems administrators are expected to be able to tell their bosses what's going on even in their downtime, why not make the ability to look at …
New Zealand to bar software patents, again
New legislation closes loophole, makes it plain Kiwis won't patent code
The software patentability row in New Zealand, which broke out last August over the wording of new patent legislation, seems to have been settled with the release of new legislation by the government.
In a move that's been welcomed locally by the IT industry, the government has clarified the original intention of the legislation …
Chinese outsourcer sets up at Uni of Wollongong
Pactera looking for on-campus hires
The University of Wollongong is to play host to a development facility of Chinese outsourcing provider Pactera.
Pactera, the offspring of a merger between VanceInfo Technologies and HiSoft Technology International, is taking 450 square metres of on-campus commercial space for software development, testing and support.
Michael …
Standard Model goes PEAR-SHAPED in CERN experiment
Exotic nuclei point shed light on a mystery of existence
It's only a small thing, but it could be big news: researchers at CERN have turned up the first evidence of exotic (and short-lived) atoms with pear-shaped nuclei.
The reasons the boffins are excited is they believe the eccentric nuclei can help them probe one of physics' official Big Questions: how come there's something …
How smart does your desk phone need to be?
IP phones promised the world, did you ever do more than dial?
The business IP telephone market has spent more than a decade trying to establish exactly how much intelligence the market wants in its telephones. The customer's answer has almost always been “less than the vendors want to sell us.” Anyone looking for an albino pachyderm can therefore point to the CPUs and APIs baked into IP …
Domain registrar attacked, customer passwords reset
Name.com scrambles after data leak
Reports are emerging that Internet registrar Name.com has suffered a data breach and is resetting all user passwords.
The breach has been revealed in an e-mail to customers published by TheNextWeb, stating that compromised information could include usernames, e-mail addresses, passwords and credit card information – the last two …
Get your very own open source nematode
Think I'll go and eat OpenWorms, served at GitHub
A project to create a complete computer simulation of a nematode called Caenorhabditis elegans has taken a small step forward, releasing a model showing the operation of a group of the worm's muscles.
The OpenWorm project has been working on its virtual nematode since December 2011, with the ambitious aim of modelling the entire …
Net darkness in Syria
Traffic drops to zero reports Google, Umbrella Security
The Syrian regime has apparently repeated its withdrawal of route announcements to take the country off the Internet, as previously happened in November 2012.
The last nationwide outage was widely interpreted as precursor to some kind of major escalation of violence by the regime, which didn't take place (this is not to minimise …
Self-assembling robot inches towards WORLD DOMINATION
Not a Von Neumann machine but still a genuinely creepy 'bot
A presentation at this week's IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Germany showed off a self-assembling printed robot.
As the video below shows, the printed robot can self-assemble using the “shape memory” characteristics of the polymers in its construction.
The result is something that starts flat and – …
Judge hands copyright troll an epic smack-down
Prenda Law lashed by US court
In a judgement peppered with criticism for the various entities clustered around the troll-machine known as Prenda Law, a US judge says the court “went to battlestations” and has passed information to various US agencies for investigation.
The judgement is peppered in equal parts with Star Trek references and unflattering …
Kiwis consider new spy laws in wake of Dotcom debacle
Will let GCSB spy on citizens
Still deeply embarrassed that its spy agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), was found to have acted illegally by capturing communications from Kim Dotcom, the New Zealand government is planning on changing its laws so the Bureau can in future spy on New Zealand citizens and residents.
NZ prime minister …
Spectrum auction closes shy of $AU2 billion
Telstra, TPG, Optus buy spectrum, skip the red undies
Australia's communications minister Senator Stephen Conroy has failed to stretch his “red undies” over the government's budget deficit: the spectrum auction, for which the results have just been announced, yielded a little under $AU2 billion.
Last year, the Senator was criticised for setting an “unrealistic” floor price of $1.36 …
Cisco borgs VHA packet core
Network upgrades prepping for 4G launch
Troubled mobile carrier Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA) is pressing ahead with the network upgrade it hopes will rebuild its fortunes in the country, with Cisco to provide the foundation of its 4G network backbone.
The Borg's ASR 5500 is to be rolled out as Voda's multimedia core platform, the companies say. VHA is preparing …
Google hit by building automation security FAIL
Choc Factory's Oz HQ hacked by researchers
The building housing Google Australia's lavish Sydney headquarters is running the known-vulnerable Tridium Niagara building management system, and has been compromised by the Cylance researchers who have made Niagara their mission.
The researchers identified the underlying system – QNX on an embedded system – and extracted the …
Next Tidbinbilla deep space antenna ready for hoist
Don't drop the dish ...
With the completion of dish assembly, the new DSS 35 antenna under construction at Australia's Tidbinbilla Deep Space Communications Complex is ready for a delicate bit of manoeuvring: from its current position on the ground, onto its pedestal.
As the image below from the Complex's Webcam shows, getting the 34-metre dish from …
Flat mobe battery? Just light a fire
Hiker hacker's maker charger is a gas, gas, gas
Sick of running out of charge while on long walks, a Swedish tinkerer has crafted a thermoelectric phone charger to revive his smartphone and GPS by burning butane.
Vulture South notes that the setup, posted on Instructables here, is wildly inefficient, but it's a use-in-emergency approach. As David Johansson, the creator of the …
Redmond probes new IE 8 vulnerability
Zero day appeared on US Dept of Labor site
Microsoft has confirmed a bug in Internet Explorer 8, CVE-2013-1347, which exposes user machines to remote code execution.
In an advisory, Microsoft says the vulnerability “exists in the way that Internet Explorer [accesses] an object in memory that has been deleted or has not been properly allocated.”
That, in turn, opens the …
IBM open sources new approach to crypto
Work on files – without decrypting them
A group of IBM researchers has released a Github project that implements a homomorphic encryption system – a way to work on encrypted data in a file without first decrypting the whole file.
Why would anyone want to do that? Partly because if you have to decrypt the file to work on it, it's going to exist as plaintext somewhere. …
Outback geothermal plant goes live
Innamincka's megawatt pilot plant starts 100 days of testing
Geodynamics has pulled the big Acme switch on its Habanero pilot plant, near the remote South Australian town of Innamincka.
Perched atop 4 km of drillings, the pilot plant has 1 MWe (megawatts of electrical energy) capacity and is about to enter a 100-day trial and demonstration project to be completed in August 2013.
The …
A10 ships new iron, OS
Layer 4 connections per-second-per-Watt as a measure of green, anyone?
A10 Networks has announced new gateway devices and a revision to its ACOS operating system.
The three new chunks of metal are the 6430 / 6430S (same unit, with and without SSL support) and the half-the-power, half-the-price 5430S.
A10's director of product marketing Paul Nicholson introduced El Reg to yet another measure of …
Quantum researchers control qubit with light
Diamonds are a girl's quantum computer's best friend
As the hunt continues for ways to manipulate qubits in solid state devices, UC Santa Barbara researchers have demonstrated using a laser to manipulate a qubit in diamond.
The qubit in question is actually considered a defect in a diamond's crystalline structure: it's called a “nitrogen-vacancy centre”, in which a nitrogen atom …
Terabit trial gives Telstra some backbone
Ericsson demos “fastest ever” long-haul link
The 995 kilometre optic fibre link from Sydney to Melbourne has played host to Australia's first demonstration of a commercial terabit-per-second fibre system.
Announcing the demonstration, Telstra's director of transport and routing engineering David Robertson noted that it owns the largest amount of fibre in the country, and …
Linux kernel 3.9 lands
Power management, new processors, SSD caching and more
Linus Torvalds has unleashed version 3.9 of the Linux kernel.
Key features in the release include caching for SSD storage, new processor architectures, power management improvements targeting tablets and phones, Chromebook support, and a nod towards Android.
The caching change, present as the dm-cache target and currently …
Cameras leak credentials, live video
D-Link scrambles upgrade, Vivotek silent says Core Sec
D-Link and Vivotek have submitted their entries for “dumbest security vulnerability of 2013”, with Core Security turning up a variety of daft bugs in their IP cameras, including hard-coded backdoor passwords.
The advisories are here for Vivotek and here for D-Link. D-Link has told Core Security it is preparing a fix, but the …
Cisco clambers aboard gig Wi-Fi bandwagon
Product catapult loaded with 802.11ac kit
Cisco has joined the growing list of vendors putting the 802.11ac “gigabit WiFi” standard into live kit, launching a “Wave 1” module for it Aironet 3600 series of access points, and promising “Wave 2” support in a future upgrade module.
The current kit, quoth the Borg, supports WiFi speed up to 1.3 Gbps, which in deployment …
One of the world's oldest experiments crawls towards a fall
Fever pitch excitement at planet's most boring webcam
Grab a coffee, fire up the browser, open the webcam, and wait: sometime soon – perhaps within days – a drop of pitch will fall, and for the first time, the event might actually have spectators.
One of the world's longest continuous scientific experiments, at the University of Queensland , lives under a bell jar in a university …
Apache attack drives traffic to malware
Blackhole redirect served by modified daemon binary
A security researcher is warning that an attack on the Apache Web server is increasingly showing up in the wild, and has published a free Python tool to check their configurations.
The attack is designed to avoid leaving disk footprints, according to this post analysing the backdoor. It exists as a modified httpd file that …
BT unleashes SIP licensing troll army
Small players collateral damage in Google-versus-BT patent drone-war
VoIP-to-PSTN termination providers and SIP vendors will be watching their inboxes for a lawyer's letter from BT, which has kicked off a taxing licensing program levying a fee on the industry, based on a list of 99 patents.
As noted in Australian telco newsletter Communications Day, the move seems to have caught the VoIP industry …
Australian Bureau of Statistics denies hacking report
A login isn't a 'hack' states stat specialist
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has been forced, by dint of a misreading of 'attack statistics', to deny that hackers (including the ubiquitous Chinese variety) have accessed pre-release sensitive data such as unemployment or inflation rates.
Last week, the Australian Financial Review offered its readers a tale titled Cyber …
