Turnbull floats e-vote, compulsory ID
Incoming communications minister Malcolm Turnbull has offered up his first post-election policy thought-bubble, suggesting that Australia should adopt electronic voting kiosks and compulsory identification for voters.
Speaking to ABC TV, Turnbull said the high level of informal (that is, invalid or incorrectly-cast) votes is so …
Google scrambles to block backdoors
The ongoing revelations about NSA snoopery have prompted The Chocolate Factory to accelerate its effort to encrypt user data at every possible point.
Mountain View had already announced that its Google Cloud Storage platform was adding server-side encryption to reassure users. User data uploaded to the service is now being …
Telstra's Thodey is NBN kingmaker after Oz election
With Saturday's emphatic election result putting almost certain to put Malcolm Turnbull into the communications ministry, the business of rejigging the National Broadband Network is about to begin in earnest.
Step one, once Turnbull assumes the ministry, will be a promised “100 day” review of the NBN. This will presumably …
Sophos pulls out spade, fills in holes in Web Appliance
Sophos has pulled out the weeds in its web-scanning software after Core Security identified multiple holes in its Web Protection Appliance versions 3.8.0, 3.8.13 and 3.7.9 and earlier.
The Core Security advisory states that if a remote attacker can gain access to the appliance's web administrator interface, the attacker could …
Data broker Acxiom lifts skirt, reveals your private bits
One of the world's largest data brokers, Acxiom, has posted a project that either allows people to correct errors in their data, or turns individuals into mechanical turks working on an unpaid data quality project.
Acxiom collects data from a vast range of sources and on-sells in portfolio of products aimed at marketers. The low …
Scientists demo light-controlled semiconductor
US boffins have documented a transition from metal to semiconductor that can be controlled by exposure to light.
The researchers, from Washington University in St Louis, created a thin film of gold nanorods coated with zinc oxide. The result: with no illumination, the gold/zinc oxide mix conducted electricity as a metal, but …
Sysadmins hail Windows Server 2012 R2's killer ... clipboard?
Tens of thousands of words have already been written about Microsoft's purchase of Nokia, and as far as The Register can tell, none of them are getting read by the hordes of sysadmins and developers that descended on the Gold Coast for TechEd.
Mergers and acquisitions aren't the sort of thing that gets an audience to interrupt a …
Windows 8.1 to freeze out small business apps
While Microsoft is happy with the “appification” of Windows, and prepares to go-live with Windows 8.1 on October 18, it's created a gap between present and future that could be a stumbling block for a bunch of small ISVs.
The kind of company that lives between the consumer and the enterprise will still be able to create and ship …
Hypersonic 'scramjet' aims for Mach 8 test flight
Queensland's SCRAMSPACE research scramjet has arrived in Norway for a test launch to be scheduled somewhere between September 15 and September 21.
Given that the project has gone from origins in the “back of a truck” (in leader Russell Boyce's earliest HyShot experiments) to a research effort worth $AU14 million, the researchers …
Arbor slurps Packetloop
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.
Announcing the purchase, Arbor says it intends to keep Packetloop's Sydney HQ alive and will add dozen staff to its Australian …
NASA releases first NuStar X-ray data burst
NASA has taken the wraps off its first NuStar data releases, releasing data collected by the X-ray observatory in July and August 2012.
The data release includes black holes – naturally enough, since that's one of the main aims of the NuStar mission – as well as X-ray binaries, supernovas, and blazars (active, supermassive black …
Cube computers come back with $US50 Android-or-Linux box
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.
Prices start at $US45 for a single-core Freescale Cortex A9 i.MX6-based unit running at up to 1.2 GHz, through to a quad- …
Canon climbs atop Facebook with over-the-top pic wrangler
Having 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.
That's what Canon …
Deloitte research says NBN a winner for households
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.
The study, by Deloitte Access Economics, suggests that most …
Telstra, Moto in lead for $AU450m-plus wireless contract
Telstra and Motorola have been named as the preferred tenderers for a major refresh of the Queensland Government's public safety networks.
Over the 15 year life of the contract, the government expects the network to cost $AU457.3 million, with the first $AU56.7 million allocated this year to get coverage in Brisbane, the Gold …
Boffins confirm quantum crypto can keep a secret
Over recent years, the gap between theoretical security of quantum crytography and practical implementation has provided plenty of fun for super-geniuses the world over.
Yes, quantum cryptography is supposed to be unbreakable. After all, if anybody even observes the state of a qubit that Alice has prepared, entangled with …
'Anonymous' to Reg hack: We know SEA leaders' names
Following the Syrian Electronic Army's (SEA's) attack on a Melbourne IT reseller which resulted in the temporary compromise of domain name records for targets as diverse as The New York Times and Twitter, a group claiming association with Anonymous now says it has compromised SEA databases and servers.
As first reported here (in …
Oz government expanding data centre footprint
The Australian government is continuing its cloud rollout with a new tender for data centre services.
In line with a policy that's attracted criticism from international providers, the government is sticking with its requirement that Australian government data is kept onshore.
The tender, posted on August 30, is looking for …
Boffins follow TOR breadcrumbs to identify users
It's easier to identify TOR users than they believe, according to research published by a group of researchers from Georgetown University and the US Naval Research Laboratory (USNRL).
Their paper, Users Get Routed: Traffic Correlation on Tor by Realistic Adversaries, is to be presented in November at November's Conference on …
WTF is … Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks?
Whether you consider the Internet of Things (all the way up to the Internet of Everything) to be the Way of The FutureTM or just This Year's Buzzword® something of an exaggeration, there's a good chance some of you will run into some of its real-world manifestations in the near future.
After all, the building you work in is …
Quantum crypto nearly ready to go mobile
While the world is still waiting for a full-blown quantum communications setup, quantum key distribution – QKD – is already a contested product market. Now, an international collaboration has shown that QKD can be brought to the smartphone.
The project, carried out by the University of Bristol, Cambridge, Griffith University in …
Qld Health starts briefing industry on IT refresh
Queensland Health, home to the now-famous payroll debacle that has cost executive jobs, a billion worth of budget blow-outs and earned IBM a ban from the sunshine state, is embarking on an IT refresh.
The agency, via the Department of Science, Information Technology, Innovation and the Arts (DSITIA), has announced a partners …
ACCC told cable nets should offer wholesale
A submission to the ACCC's fixed line services declaration review has re-ignited an ancient debate about whether the regulator should pry open Telstra's and Optus' HFC cables.
While there's no technical reason wholesale broadband services can't be offered over HFC, retailer interest has been so muted that the competition …
Kiwis (finally) confirm software ban under new patent law
It's taken five years, but New Zealand's parliament has finally passed its long-awaited patent reform, which among other things makes it clear that a bit of code isn't enough to attract patent protection.
The tortuous history of the new Patents Bill has seen IT companies lobbying on both sides of the debate. Local kiwi firms …
Python regurgitates Dropbox secrets to boffins
A couple of security researchers have set spines shivering in the cloud world by demonstrating that Dropbox's obfuscated code can be reverse-engineered, along the way capturing SSL data from the service's cloud and bypassing the two-factor authentication used to secure user data.
However, as is clear from the Usenix research …
IBM lands spook data-sharing standard at Oz airports
The Australian Customs and Border Protection Service (ACBPS) has gone live with IBM-delivered passenger analytics which it says will help identify risky passengers before they enter Australia.
In a rather coy canned statement, Big Blue says the system will check Passenger Name Records (PNRs) against “other relevant material” to …
Boffins force Skype to look you in the eye
Accurate eye-to-eye contact in a videoconference, a feature of high end systems as well as any phone or tablet with a front-facing camera, is a problem for laptop users, because the camera is almost slightly off-direction from the image.
Hence, as any Skype user knows, there's an unfortunate effect in which people are looking …
New York Times, Twitter domain hijackers 'came in through front door'
Hacktivist collective the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) – or someone using its name – has claimed responsibility for hijacking the Twitter.co.uk, NYTimes.com and HuffingtonPost.co.uk web addresses.
At the time of writing, many of the domain names the SEA claimed to have seized were back under their owners' control. In some cases …
Tesla cars 'hackable' says Dell engineer
Slack authentication in Tesla's Model S REST API exposes the electric car to a variety of non-safety but non-trivial attacks, according to a Dell engineer and Tesla owner.
In this post over at O'Reilly, Dell senior distinguished engineer and executive director of cloud computing George Reese says the “flawed” authentication …
An autopilot the size of a postage stamp
A Dutch research group has demonstrated an autopilot about the size of a passport photo, as the controller of a quadcopter.
Part of the open source Paparazzi free autopilot project, the Lisa/S packs a decent amount of capability onto0 such a small space. While the ARM Cortex M3 MCU only runs at 72 MHz, it's processing signals …
Come and get it: Feedly Pro hits general availability
Google Reader refugees have another alternative reader, with Feedly announcing that its Feedly Pro is now available to all.
Not, however, for free. The $US45 a year or $US5 per month might look like stretching the willingness of punters to hand over dollars for a humble RSS reader, but the development work on the Pro version was …
News Ltd benches AWS, floats footy app on Azure
News Limited, whose Australian entity has delivered customer testimonials at an Amazon Web Services event (here are the slides), has a little bit of Microsoft lipstick on its collar, courtesy of an announcement that a new Australian Football League (Aussie rules) service is going to be running on the Windows Azure cloud.
It may …
Cryptome suffers brief take-down over Japanese 'terror' files
Longstanding whistleblower site Cryptome.org is back online after a brief takedown, sparked by its hosting of a list of alleged Japanese terrorists.
The takedown by host Network Solutions came as a result of a complaint signed Sima Jiro, who complained that the 114 documents in a file identified as jp-terrorist-files.zip …
Oz retailers crying wolf over incomplete data
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has inadvertently re-ignited Australia's Internet shopping debate by trying to get a handle on how much Australians might be spending online.
The scale of Australia's Internet retail is ill measured and hotly debated, not least because bricks-and-mortar retailers squealing the “Internet ate my …
Pulsars: the GPS beacons of the cosmos
Want to navigate over huge distances with nearly superhuman accuracy? All you need is a laptop, the right software, and some way to keep track of the signals of distant pulsars.
What began as an attempt to improve the search for gravitational waves has had the unexpected secondary outcome of demonstrating that pulsars could just …
Google cripples Chromecast third party replay
The Chocolate Factory has decided Chromecast was a little too capable, it seems. The developers of the Fling app, which allowed users to stream local content via Google's video dongle, are complaining that a recent software update has killed it.
Fling isn't the only app to get find itself rolling in the dust after being chucked …
Good Tech: Windows is as secure as a rooted Android mobe
The world's not so far away from asking “why can't our laptops be as secure as our mobiles?”, according to Good Technology's John Herrema.
Visiting Australia last week for the Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit, Herrema told The Register it's time to challenge the idea that mobiles are intrinsically less secure than …
EFF, Lessig battling copyright takedowns
Lawrence Lessig and the Electronic Frontiers Foundation are joining forces to fight off what they see as DCMA-trolling from Australian record company Liberation Music.
At issue is a lecture series Lessig put together for a Creative Commons conference in South Korea. The Harvard Law School professor's talk included short clips of …
CipherCloud lands in Oz
US encryption vendor CipherCloud, setup by ArcSight founding VP of engineering Pravin Kothari, is going live with an Australian office to provide professional services to local customers and give sales a kick along.
The company positions itself as allowing companies to resolve the most common concern of moving to cloud computing …
APNIC boffins may enlist TCP to defend DNS
Could defending the Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure against amplification attacks be as simple as switching protocols in resolvers? Probably not – but an experiment conducted at APNIC has far-reaching implications.
As Geoff Huston, chief scientist at APNIC, writes, DNS amplification attacks are easy to launch and can be …
NSC Group slurped by Telstra
Telstra has acquired voice systems integrator NSC Group, saying it will integrate the 230-head unified communications and contact centre specialist into its Network Application and Services business.
The 1989-founded NSC – founded as North Shore Connections and at the time a Sydney PABX dealer – claims 600 customers in Australia …
Corruption cops warn on old-school project management
The New South Wales Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) has cast its eye over the IT sector, and suspects that there's a gap between project management practise and the real world that opens the door to corruption.
The issue the ICAC is trying to address is the way that a shift from staff to contractors can open the …
Cisco goes public with major vulns
Users of Cisco's Unified Communications Manager, UCM instant messaging and presence, and Prime Central hosted collaboration system need to get busy with patches, after the Borg announced denial-of-service vulnerabilities across all three platforms.
UCM 7.1, Cisco advises, has an improper error handling vulnerability that can be …
Assange's WikiLeaks Party running-mate departs in blaze of glory
Arguments over how the Australian political party founded by Julian AssangeTM, the WikiLeaks Party, directs votes in the Australian Senate have prompted the resignation of high-profile candidate and Assange's running mate in Victoria, Leslie Cannold, who announced today: "To keep being a candidate feels like I'm breaking faith …
Hardware failures cause more comms outages than hackers: EU
If you're living in constant fear of a cybergeddon, here's a handy reality check. According to ENISA – the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security – has just produced its report into what caused 79 major communications outages in Europe in 2011-2012.
If you were having trouble with phone, mobile or Internet …
Kodak's new life to begin in September
Eastman Kodak will officially restart operations on September 3, after a Manhattan judge signed off on the last aspects of its reorganisation plan.
Last week, Judge Allan Gropper flipped the bird at disgruntled shareholders, who believed they should recover something from the smoking ruins of the once world-dominating …
West Australia guarantees SKA funding to 2019
Australia's International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research has had its future secured through to 2019, courtesy of a $AU26 million commitment from the Western Australian government announced at the end of last week.
The ICRAR was instrumental in attracting part of the international Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project to …
Boffin blends benevolent beer
It's not a hangover cure, but it could help retain the beneficial effects of beer while mitigating some of its damage. A researcher from Queensland's Griffith Health Institute has found a way to make beer work like electrolyte drinks without ruining its taste.
Associate Professor Ben Desbrow is working on the idea that beer …
Mind-reading MRI reads letters in the brain
Researchers from Radboud University Nijmegen are claiming that with a sufficiently-sensitive MRI and decent mathematical modelling, they can reconstruct images of the brain recognising letters seen by the test subject.
Specifically, the researchers say they have “used data from the scanner to determine what a test subject is …
VLSCI fires up 20 teraflop Barcoo
The Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative – VLSCI – has gone live with its latest big iron, Barcoo, an x86 architecture machine with double the capacity of the facility's Merri x86 system.
The 70-node Barcoo runs 1,120 Sandy Bridge cores (16 cores per node), with 20 Xeon Phi 5110P cards distributed across ten nodes. …
