CoreData fends off attack
Red-tops get red faces
Online analytics and research data company CoreData has had to pull systems associated with serving data to newspaperThe Australian after attackers compromised a server and tried to use it to host malicious code, early in the morning of 8 April.
The attack showed as the familiar “This site may harm your computer” Google warning …
Mozilla floats payment simplification balloon
Posts draft of Web payment spec, hopes world won't yawn
The Mozilla Foundation is pitching the idea that Web apps need a common payments API, and has put just such an interface into Firefox OS to try and give the idea some momentum.
The Foundation's argument, put forward in this blog post, is that the business of adding a payments button to a Web page is clunky and cumbersome for all …
Lasers capture 3D images from a kilometre away
Not even distance will save you
It sounds like a privacy advocate's worst nightmare: fire an infrared laser, scan the object, get its time-of-flight, and you can create a 3D imaging system that works at up to a kilometre distance.
It's not a completely new idea, of course. It is, in fact, quite close to how we use airborne LIDAR to get high-resolution digital …
Patch time for PostgreSQL
Crashable and hackable
The maintainers of the PostgreSQL database have released an urgent patch to cope with a vulnerability that allows remote users to crash servers, while authenticated users can execute arbitrary code.
It's time for admins to get busy: the Shodan tool identifies around 170,000 servers that are visible from the Internet, here.
As …
Kiwi boffins bid up Earth-like planet prediction
A HUNDRED beeellion!
We'll see your lousy 17 billion Earth-like planets, Smithsonian, and raise you 83 billion: that's the message coming out of a New Zealand group that's proposing a new detection technique in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The Japan-New Zealand collaboration proposes using gravitational micro-lensing in …
Holden bakes Siri into Barinas
'Siri, this doesn't look like Mildura'
General Motors' antipodean outpost, Holden, is trying to put a bit of cool into its four-cylinder shopping trolley, the Barina, by integrating Siri into its electronics.
Well, not just cool: with a suitable iPhone running iOS 6 connected to its electronic innards, Siri will let drivers make “eyes-free” calls, and to avoid …
Is NBN Co about to pay for 80 years of power pole access?
Historical prices for HFC access suggest NSW Government overcharging massively
According to the NSW State Government, NBN Co is being completely unreasonable in declining to fork over in the order of $400 million for access to electricity poles in that state. In response, NBN Co is, as it warned it would in October 2012, invoking the Telecommunications Act and using the poles without electricity authority …
Australia to reveal tech giants' tax tricks
Opening up the Dutch sandwich to reveal the shameful ingredients
Australia's assistant treasurer David Bradbury has outlined a plan to make the ingredients of the infamous “Double Irish Dutch Sandwich” – a recipe for tax minimisation used by tech giants - known to all, so that the public can understand just what the likes of Apple, Microsoft and Google are up to.
Bradbury yesterday released a …
Why does our galaxy spiral?
Video Spread your arms out wide, Milky Way
A group of astrophysicists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the University of Wisconsin-Madison say they've resolved a long-standing question: how long do spiral arms in galaxies like our own last?
The boffins aren't just thinking about our very own Milky Way: the paper, published in The Astrophysical …
Memory vendors pile on '3D' stacking standard
HMC 1.0 in the wild
More memory responding faster in a smaller footprint: that's what chip vendors are hoping to achieve with the announcement of the HMC 1.0 specification.
The standard, available here, sets down the specs for memory chip stacking using through-silicon vias (TSVs). In other words: individual memory dies, stacked vertically on top …
'Australia's so big freight costs are high' claims don't add up
El Reg turns shipping agent to test price gouge explanations
One of the fallback positions of IT vendors defending their high Australian prices has been to remind Australia that shipping and transport are expensive here.
So, ever your servant – and confronted with the kind of slow-news-day syndrome that can happen only when America is still busy trying to identify which stories were April …
Lotsa lasers an option for the Next Big Physics
What's next after colliders?
If you thought the world of big physics was drawing to a close with the confirmation that yes, the Higgs boson appears to be a boson and appears to be a Higgs, think again: CERN's boffins, along with thinkers of deep thoughts from École Polytechnique, Southampton University's Optoelectronics Centre and Jena are imagining what …
OpenDNS plots expansion with new funding
Adds Juniper alumnus to board
OpenDNS is plotting an expansion both to its global presence and to the services it offers, with the appointment of former Juniper EVP Stefan Dyckerhoff joins as a member of the OpenDNS board, bringing with him an unspecified slab of funding under his Sutter Hill Ventures fund.
OpenDNS says the funding and management expertise …
IT and comms power consumption could surge in 2013
Sleep, ye routers, sleep
An Italian researcher has predicted that the global Internet's power demands will surge by 19 percent during 2013, compared to 2012 – and that over time, such ballooning electricity demand will become unsustainable.
In a paper published in Science last week (abstract), University of Catania researcher Diego Reforgiato urges more …
Cricketer the face of in-car heads-up satnav
A 'Boon' for drivers
Popular former test cricketer David Boon is to be the face and voice of a new satnav add-on launched in Sydney today.
'Your Guide Boonie', as the system is known, is a wallet-sized unit that attaches to the car's ceiling and projects the translucent images as a heads-up display on the vehicle's windscreen. It packs enough …
Oz states count cars using Bluetooth
Traffic studies bring out tinfoil hats
The government of Australia's Capital Territory (ACT) has issued a statement about the use of Bluetooth-sniffing technology for traffic studies.
The issue arose as the result of grassroots activism from Canberra-centric news service The-RiotACT, which has its take on events here.
RiotACT considers the Bluetooth collection to be …
Boffins brew eyes on bugs' wings
Surface 'rips bacteria to shreds'
Scientists at an Australian university have grown eye cells on Cicadas' wings, after noticing that the nano-structures on that part of the insects' bodies have anti-bacterial properties.
The James Cook University researchers chose retinal cells as their test case because, as they said to AAP, these cells “won't grow just …
EMC, Carbonite fight off patent pursuer
Troll kicked off the backup cloud
It may be too soon to say that the tide is turning, but EMC and Carbonite have become the latest IT companies to beat off a high-profile patent lawsuit.
Law360 reports that EMC and Carbonite had their win on the basis of the validity of the patents.
The suit started in August 2010 when Oasis Research accused 17 companies of …
Off-the-shelf optics kit tweaked for bonkers performance
Radio tricks applied to light
A couple of Australian optics labs have joined up with vendor Finisar to demonstrate an energy-efficient optical system transmitting 10 Tbps over 850 km.
On its own, 10 Tbps isn't anything to crow about: terabit systems are, after all, routine in the long-haul market. However, doing it on one fibre and cutting down the energy – …
Telstra issues report on Warrnambool exchange fire
Disaster recovery 'designed in real time'
Telstra has determined that the catastrophic fire in its Warrnambool Exchange, which in late 2012 took 100,000 Victorians offline, was an accident.
The carrier has issued a report on the incident, the summary of which says an unspecified electrical fault was the cause of the fire, either in the roof of the exchange's control …
Want faster fibre? Get rid of the glass
Hollow fibre propagates optics near speed of light
One of the most irritating expressions people can use, “broadband at the speed of light”, is a little closer to coming true thanks to researchers from the University of Southampton, who have demonstrated air-filled fibres with propagation happening at 99.7 percent of c.
In a conventional fibre, the glass acts as a waveguide: the …
Slime mould mashup models fiendish computing problem
A travelling salesman walks into a blob...
A pair of English researchers have offered up a “virtual slime mould” as a technique for one of mathematics' – and computer science's – classic problems, the travelling salesman problem.
In the travelling salesman problem, the challenge is to find the shortest possible route that includes a given set of locations or cities: as …
Mobile location data identifies individuals
You are where you go
One of the arguments in favour of anonymous mobile location tracking, nanely that it doesn't provide enough information to identify individuals, has been slapped down by a US-Belgian study. An anonymous trace of one phone's movements, plus a small amount of external data, can pick out one person out of millions.
An analysis of 1 …
Sony joins iWear face-off
LG also puts hand up in world+dog post-smartphone melee
The battle to secure consumers' eyeballs with as-yet-unreleased products offering not-yet-defined capabilities is set to intensify with Sony filling patent applications for – go on, guess – wearable computers.
From the patent application, US 20130069850, we learn that Sony has no scant for battery life and wants to use both …
Transfield scores Sydney NBN build contract
$AU170 million for first two years
Northern Territory partner Syntheo might be having trouble matching the pace demanded of it by NBN Co, but the builder of Australia's National Broadband Network is apparently satisfied with Transfield Services, announcing a new contract with the latter covering Sydney.
In a brief statement to the Australian Securities Exchange, …
Lightspeed variable say intellectuels français
Vacuum isn't always empty, French boffins argue
French researchers have proposed a mechanism by which the observed speed of light might not be the constant we think it is: it could, in fact, vary at the attosecond level.
It's not, however, time to reach for the “the old boffins were wrong!” template, because their reasoning is actually elegant and simple: we know that vacuum …
Nokia deflates Google's video codec thought bubble
VP8 proposals face fight from the Finnish
Nokia has published an IETF patent declaration that could spell trouble for Google's hopes to pitch VP8 as a new standard codec.
Google has put forward VP8 as part of the WebM project, and has put forward various IETF documents, such as RFC 6386, this draft (data formatting and decoding) and this (RTP payloads).
Mountain View …
Belgian boffins boast after boosting TCP to 50 Gbps
Multipath demo could ship a Blu-Ray disk in five seconds
Belgian researchers at ICTEAM have announced a Multipath TCP (MPTCP) demonstration that's routed 50 Gbps of traffic across multiple different paths.
While there wouldn't be much to crow about doing this at the physical layer, the ICTEAM researchers have squeezed this performance out of a system that needs to make various kinds …
T-Mobile patches Wi-Fi eavesdrop vuln
Certificate error discovered by Berkeley students
Last week, T-Mobile scrambled to patch a vulnerability uncovered by two University of California Berkeley students that made its Wi-Fi calling feature susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks.
At issue in the students' research, published in full here (PDF), is the certificate implementation used in the feature. The now-patched …
Universe gains an extra hundred million years
Planck also refines matter measurements
Among the mysteries revealed by the first set of papers released out of the Planck telescope data is a new estimate for the age of the Universe: at 13.8 billion years, it's 100 million years older than previously calculated.
As explained by The Register here, the space probe's mission is to give astronomers a better map of the …
Finland a haven for vulnerable SCADA systems
Shodan vuln search, the gift that keeps on giving
Security researchers in Finland have turned up thousands of unsecured Internet-facing SCADA systems in that country, using the Shodan search engine.
The researchers, from Aalto University, ran their test in January, and found 2,915 exposed systems running functions from building automation to transport and water supply. Those …
NBN collapses* into chaos*
*If 'collapses' and 'chaos'= <5 per cent delay
Australia's National Broadband Network, due for completion in 2021, has announced a three-month delay in its fibre-to-the-premises construction schedule, which if not recovered would represent a miss of a couple of percent on the project's timing.
While declining to direct blame outwards, NBN Co CEO Mike Quigley told a media …
Bitcoin prices spike on Euro woes
Spanish citizens hiding their currency under the bed
The well-publicised idea that Cyprus could pinch ten per cent of all local savings accounts to help pay for its government's budgetary woes seems to have sparked a rush of interest in the crypto-currency Bitcoin.
According to Bloomberg, Bitcoin apps are soaring up the download charts in Spain, of all places, based on BGR reports …
Council offers free iPads
It's a library loan, so you'll have to return it
A Sydney library is claiming a world first: it's going to add Apple iPads and Samsung Galaxy tablets to its lending shelves.
Perhaps regrettably, the chance to borrow a tablet will only be available to residents of the City of Canterbury – a local government area to the south-west of Sydney's central business district – at least …
Fukushima switchboard defeated by rat
NON-MUTANT RODENT in NUKE PLANT ELECTRO-SHOCKER
A careless rat is being blamed for a power outage that left the Fukushima nuclear plant's storage tanks without cooling.
Late on Monday, March 18, TEPCO experienced a power cut at cooling equipment serving the nuclear fuel storage tanks, in an incident that took 30 hours to overcome (the company emphaised that during the outage …
Voyager goes off a (helio) cliff
Tiny traveller still telling tales
Probably the most-loved survivor of 1970s space optimism, Voyager, has sent back signals indicating that it's left the heliosphere.
Scientists are now discussing whether they should consider the 35-year-old probe to be in interstellar space, or to have entered a new region of space that hasn't been previously described.
The …
Samsung: We're doing smart watches too
Patent lawyers uncork the champagne world-wide
It's Cupertino's turn to capture a flag planted by Samsung: while Apple has been content to allow leaks to fuel rumours about its “smart watch” plans, its Korean nemesis/rival/copycat has gone public with its project.
In a discussion that will probably warm the hearts of patent lawyers worldwide, Samsung's Lee Young Hee, …
Cisco slip puts hardware at risk
Borg announces weak password feature
Cisco has issued a security advisory revealing that it mis-coded the implementation of a new password hashing algorithm.
Its “Type 4” password implementation was supposed to salt passwords and then run them through 1,000 iterations of SHA-256 for storage, following the Password-Based Key Derivation Function (PBKDF) version 2 …
Breakneck star orbits black hole at record speed
Vid Two million km/h SPEED DEMON
The ESA's XMM-Newton has turned up a star and black hole, separated by around a million kilometres, orbiting each other in just 2.4 hours.
The pair outstrips the previous record of 3.2 hours for an orbit, held by Swift J1753.5-0127. The speed at which each of the two objects move is pretty impressive. Since they orbit a common …
Google adds validation to DNSSEC
One small step by one giant foot
Worldwide, the rollout of DNSSEC can comfortably be described as “glacial”, but Google valiantly continues to try to give it profile. Having launched its own DNSSEC service three years ago, Mountain View has now added DNSSEC validation to its public DNS resolvers.
Announced in this blog post, Google says the move means “we can …
First sale doctrine survives US Supreme Court
Books are still property
Dead tree books have kept one of their few advantages over e-books, with the US Supreme Court upholding the first sale doctrine, which states that the publisher's exclusivity over a book ends with its purchase.
The case was brought by John Wiley & Sons against Thai student Supap Kirtsaeng, who had noticed that textbooks in his …
Juniper goes skinny to pack routers into little racks
A central office router staff won't trip over
Juniper Networks has caught the “smaller is better for routers” bug, kicking off a 300mm form factor member of its PTX family which it says targets the traditional telco exchange, where rackspace was designed for the phone switching kit of the 1970s instead of the computer racks in data centres.
Speaking to The Register ahead of …
Has the ACCC tripped up in its ADSL declaration?
Virtual circuits for ADSL are way too expensive: The Register tallies up the numbers
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) declarations are always news, and with good reason: The ACCC's regulated prices set the floor underneath a host of retail services – mobile, broadband, telephony, business data and so on.
New declarations are always accompanied by lobbying, both in media outlets and in the …
Virnetx loses Cisco case: VPNs not its property
The Borg as great big billy-goat gruff
Non-practising entity VirnetX has had its patent case against Cisco dumped by a Texas jury, meaning it won't be seeing any of the $US258 million it had demanded of the networking giant.
The low-profile company with links to the national security community via Science Applications International Corp issued its demands in 2010, …
Huawei USB modems vulnerable
Drivers, config, updates all dangerous
Huawei has been accused of poor security practice by Russian researcher Nikita Tarakanov, who told Black Hat Europe last week that the vendor's 3G and 4G devices are vulnerable and its update server is a massive attack vector.
The update server in the Netherlands that Tarakanov tested probably isn't the only one used by Huawei, …
Drones with freakin' CLAWS grab objects like eagles
Welcome our new overlords
Is there such a thing as learning too many lessons from nature? If you find the exploits of quad-copter researchers spooky, don't watch the very latest video demonstration from the University of Pennsylvania's aptly-named GRASP laboratory.
Looking at how raptors like sea-eagles can catch fish without losing control or crashing, …
Foxtel cries wolf at the threat of fast broadband
IFPI script gets the megaphone treatment
Foxtel Australia boss Richard Freudenstein has picked up the IPFI megaphone and asked Australia's federal government to protect his business model from the rampant piracy that will doubtless emerge from the rollout of the National Broadband Network.
Speaking to the ASTRA (Australian Subscription Television and Radio Association …
Micro-drum acts as quantum memory
NIST puts qubits in a spin
Memory is one of the difficult bits of quantum computing. For example, while the polarisation of a photon encodes a quantum state, it's very difficult to get photons to stay where they're put.
A group of researchers from JILA – a joint institute between the University of Colorado and the National Institute of Standards and …
Photonic router vendor exits stealth-mode, sparks hypegasm
Integrated photonics comes of age?
Without the obligatory hype from the "every great business starts with venture capital" press, it is an interesting proposition: that turning integrated electro-optical chips into the basis of a router yields a faster device that's smaller, uses less power, and generates less heat.
That's what's being claimed by US-Israeli …
Oz Bank share price dives after reveal of IBM/Oracle plan
National Australia Bank investors don't like the look of its IT plans
Is it feasible that investors are belatedly learning that a technology refresh might involve spending huge amounts of money on risky projects?
If the National Australia Bank's experience yesterday (13 March) is any guide, the answer might be a tentative “yes”. The bank, which suffered some high-profile outages during 2012, …
