BBC's new bosses - the lawyers - strike out Savile probe testimony
Comment Why the blanks matter the most
What's the difference between the NHS and the BBC? You can't get fired from the NHS, and you can't get fired from the BBC. It's a trick question.
As we know from the Mid Staffordshire hospitals scandal, despite "the terrible and unnecessary suffering of hundreds of people" from poor care, nobody was sacked. The lowliest staff …
4G in the UK? Why the smart money still says 'Meh'
Analysis Along with the industry
Last September, when the UK's first 4G service emerged, I promised to sit out the switch to high-speed mobile broadband for as long as possible. What I didn't expect was the mobile industry joining me on the sidelines. Budge up, please - it's getting a bit crowded here.
It would not be fair to say the UK mobile industry is …
Meet the stealthiest UK startup's app Swiftkey - and its psychic* keyboard
* Actually quite a lot of maths in new version 4
If ever there was a company that found itself in the right place at the right time, it's TouchType - the team behind SwiftKey.
The firm is one of Britain's most successful tech startups: it says its intellectual property is used in 100 million phones and that its SwiftKey software was last year's best-selling program in the …
The cheap 3D craft pen that scribbles over 3D printing hype
$75 tool turns doodles into actual things
How many printers do you have in your house? And how many pens? I would bet the ratio is at least a dozen pens to every printer, if not more. So is there any reason the ratio of 3D-pens-to-printers is going to be significantly different?
A US startup has come up with a 3D-model-making pen that allows you to "draw" plastic shapes …
Wikipedia's Gibraltar 'moratorium' - how's it going?
World's most interesting territory just gets more interesting
Last October Wikipedia's supreme leader Jimmy Wales called for a "strong moratorium" on the online project's strange obsession with promoting Gibraltar - even suggesting a five-year ban on Gibraltar-loving Did You Know... posts on Wikipedia's front page.
"I think it is clear that there should be a strong moratorium on any …
BBC Vision and Audio tossed on bonfire, replaced by 'TV', 'Radio'
Strategy Unboutique New DG calls a spade a spade, kills off euphemisms
In a radical rebranding move, the BBC will rename the department responsible for television programmes to "TV", and the department responsible for radio to "Radio". The department that produces journalism - sport and news - will henceforth be known as the "Journalism" department.
The changes coincide with a reshuffle of Beeb top …
Nokia's Elopocalypse two years on: Has Microsoft kept its side of the bargain?
Analysis The Lumias are here. What's Redmond got to show?
It's two years since the "Elopocalypse". This week in 2011 Nokia's new CEO Stephen Elop set Europe's biggest technology company off in a radical new direction.
Nokia would license its flagship phone software from Microsoft, rather than develop its own, set fire to three of its own mobile platforms, and eventually shed thousands …
Official: America now a nation of broadband whingers
Analysis It's no utopia, but at least you don't get shot for chewing gum
In popular mythology, the British are a nation of whingers, while Americans get on and fix things. This was certainly my experience of crossing the Atlantic to live in the USA. When a London Tube train came to an unexpected halt, you would brace yourself for a malevolent explosion of spittle. The exhalation was a short hand for …
Review finds Wikipedia UK board needs major leadership overhaul
Transparency? Isn't that a pub in Gibraltar?
A Wikimedia UK board member who had only been in the role for four months resigned late last year after raising conflict-of-interest issues at the organisation, which is one of the 39 local chapters founded to support and promote the projects of the San Francisco-based Wikimedia Foundation*. But it was only weeks after the …
Can BlackBerry survive? Well, the woods are still full of bear poo
Analysis BES and BBM, QED: Not RIP IMO
BlackBerry brought its top bosses to Europe this week for its annual Jam developer event on the continent. With the launch of the new BlackBerry OS 10, and its Z10 and Q10 smartphones, now behind it, this is a good time to look at company's realistic prospects.
I think the Canadian tech giant still holds a few aces, but before …
BlackBerry Q10: This quirky QWERTY will keep loyalists perky
Hands On Touchscreen and a keyboard? So mad useful it might just work
Eight million people in the UK use a BlackBerry and almost every single one of those phones has a physical QWERTY keyboard. And as good as the virtual keyboard on BlackBerry's touchscreen Z10 may be - it's the best, for my money - a fair number of people will want to use a smartphone with a real keyboard. The Q10 is BlackBerry's …
BIS, bash, bosh: El Reg solves BlackBerry 10 email bafflement
So you've got a new Z10, what are your options?
Is a BlackBerry that doesn't use BlackBerry's email service still a BlackBerry? The Company-Otherwise-Known-As-RIM (TCOKARIM*) hopes so.
It thinks it's time to move on, and in an attempt to broaden its appeal to new punters the new BlackBerry 10 phones won't support the BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS). Instead, the devices …
BlackBerry 10: Good news, there's still time to fix this disaster
First impressions The Z10 is hard work, a fair bit is missing, but not a write-off. Yet
If BlackBerry is to complete the greatest comeback since Lazarus, it all depends on how it can lure back former users as well as woo new customers.
Which means its fate hinges on BlackBerry 10, its new operating system and apps platform. BB10 has three things going for it. It’s technically sophisticated and well up to the …
Nokia tries its luck with a sub-£150 Win Phone 8: The Lumia 620
But will the colours distract Apple from the rounded corners?
Nokia’s latest budget smartphone brings the price of admission to Windows Phone 8 below the £150 mark. From today O2 will sell the Lumia 620 at £149.99 on pay-as-you-go, a bargain considering what’s inside. The network will also chuck in an additional free colour cover.
Other operators will also offer the 620: Three and Virgin …
'Gaia' Lovelock: Wind turbines 'may become like Easter Island statues'
Blasts Green 'fundamentalists' destroying civilisation
Former climate change alarmist Dr James Lovelock, famous for popularising the "Gaia" metaphor, continues his journey back to rationality.
Lovelock is objecting to a "medium sized" (240ft high) erection planned for his neighbourhood in North Devon by infamous windfarm operator Ecotricity. The UK currently has 3,000 onshore …
BBC: What YOU spent on our lawyers in Secret Climate 28 debacle
The only UK govt agency with a blanket FOIA exemption
The BBC has revealed the cost to the licence-fee payer of its surreal legal fight to keep a publicly available list from the public. Or at least a small part of the cost we all paid in the affair which became known as "28Gate".
Regular readers will no doubt recall that 28Gate saw the Beeb attempt to keep secret the names of 28 …
RIM ends Reg headline pun filth (and launches two new phones)
Pic They were all rimmed out. Plus: Specs for new BlackBerry OS 10 mobes
As expected, RIM today unveiled its much-delayed QNX-powered smartphone operating system, BlackBerry OS 10, along with two new handsets. The Canadian company also changed its name from Research In Motion to BlackBerry along the way.
(It's quite a drastic way of evading our double entendres, but needs must.)
The first device out …
The Death of Voice: Mobile phone calls now 50 per cent shorter
'Did you get my email?' 'Yes' 'Oh'
Vodafone reckons the average duration of phone calls on its network has halved in five years. People now talk for around one minute and forty seconds, rather than over three minutes.
The figure was calculated from both business and consumer customer data in fifteen main Vodafone markets, the network's business services director …
Nokia turns a PROFIT. Sort of
Ship may not be sinking but passengers seemingly prefer lifeboats
Nokia announced a pre-tax profit of €375m for the fourth quarter of last year today, suggesting the deep cuts of the past year, including the axing of around 20,000 employees, have allowed management to steady the ship. The profit included sales of its corporate HQ and $250m support payments from Microsoft.
Group net sales in …
Wad of BlackBerry OS 10 pics 'leaks' from RIM's inner circle
Hundreds of screenshots overflow the web
A "leak" of more than a hundred screenshots purporting to be from the release version of BlackBerry OS 10 has washed up on a blog.
For those readers fascinated by setup screens, user licence agreements and configuration dialogue boxes, a treat awaits you here. For those of you who are not, we can summarise: it's very much as …
EU-wide mega-Leveson 'needed' to silence Press, bloggers
Now write some nice stories about Europe, please - new report
A group reporting to the European Commission has recommended the regulation of the media and bloggers. It also called for the creation of several new regulatory apparatus for fining, monitoring and chivvying the Press.
The tiny team - two law experts and "new media" attention-seeker Ben Hammersley - are billed as the "High-Level …
Google v Microsoft mobile war: Who's REALLY to blame?
It's just like the old days of sparring tech titans
Microsoft first learned about Google's plans to drop support for Redmond's ActiveSync for those signing up for a free Google account last summer, but now it wants the search giant to delay the decision, according to a report.
Google's plan to drop push email, calendar and contacts syncing via the ActiveSync protocol emerged …
RIM's Heins beams: BB10 must walk the walk before we talk the talk
Vid Door held ajar for nuke-plant smartphone OS licensing
RIM will leave the door open for those wishing to license its QNX-powered smartphone operating system - but not just yet.
CEO Thorsten Heins has told Die Welt that BlackBerry OS 10 must prove itself in the marketplace before any deals can be cut, but he didn't rule out any agreements.
“First we have to fulfil our promises. If …
Kim Dotcom's locker may be full, but the cupboard is bare
Comment Reduce the value of creative work to the value of its storage? That's not smart
Do you fancy your chances with Kim "Dotcom" Schmitz's new online file locker? It's staggeringly unoriginal in every respect - it's even called Mega, like his last one - but I'll propose we think about it in a new way. So I haven't come to mock the rotund self-promoter, but rather to talk about what might happen if its users were …
China turns to no-name handsets: Android - without the Google-iness
Thanks for coughing up for development, G
There could be trouble on the horizon for Google. Consumers in the world's biggest mobile phone market appear to be shunning big-name Android handsets for no-name Androids - with Google stripped out. That's the trend identified by Enders analyst Ben Evans in a must-read blog post here.
The dataset is mobile traffic to Baidu over …
Tell Facebook who's the greatest: YOU are!
Opinion Or you can just buy a mirror instead
HMV called in the administrators on Tuesday, prompting wailing and mourning from thousands of people who hadn't set foot in one of its outlets for years. Sky News brought in Andrew Harrison, the tech-savvy editor of Q magazine, for what I suspect the editors wanted: a simple soundbite on an entire industry extrapolated from the …
Media barons threaten to spike UK.gov's audacious copyright grab
Instagram-like gobble of pics and code dragged into courts
A major legal challenge threatens to put a spike through the Conservative-LibDem coalition's radical overhaul of copyright, including the proposed Instagram-like land grab of photos, source code and other work.
Two years ago, the Prime Minister launched the so-called "Google Review" to investigate making the UK's copyright …
Microsoft ends Mac users' Windows Phone 8 misery
Stone the crows, fanbois can actually use their mobes now
Microsoft has updated its Mac OS X mobile software so that owners of new Windows Phone 8 handsets can synchronise music and photos with their Apple computers consistently.
An update for the Windows Phone client for Macs appeared on the Apple App Store on 31 October, but while Windows Phone 7.5 devices continued to sync up just …
Zuck on that! Instagram loses HALF its hipsters in a month
People do care about copyright - when it's their own
Think users don't care about copyright? Time to think again. The spectacular fallout from Instagram's photo landgrab continues.
Shortly before Christmas, the Facebook-owned social network proposed changing its terms of use so it could exploit members' photographs for profit - without compensating the owners. This prompted a …
Inside the new climate row as Mystic Met Office goes cool on warming
Analysis Worst set of predictions ON RECORD?
Britain's Met Office has come under fire for two pieces of crystal-ball gazing involving global temperature and British rainfall. On Christmas Eve, the Met's temperature prediction for the UK was quietly revised downwards, and only merited a press release this week after physics blog Tallbloke's Talkshop noticed the change. …
Nokia: Ship's now stable, all we need is passengers
Analysis Everything's rosy except Lumia
Europe's biggest technology company Nokia caught a few people by surprise with its outlook yesterday. Nokia released far more information than a company typical discloses in a preview - an unusual amount.
Ratings agencies may regard Nokia as "junk", and the fallen industry leader has flogged off and leased back its glittering HQ …
Guess who'll grab Facebook Sponsored Stories payout? (Hint: Not the victims)
Comment It's not like you'll ALL come calling for measly $10... bitch
Because of a quirk of the US legal system, the bulk of the $20m from Facebook's class action privacy settlement meant for people affected by its Sponsored Stories privacy gaffe* will likely go to "citizens' groups" - and concerns have been raised over the relationship between the beneficiaries and powerful corporations they …
Nokia chief Elop: 'Android? Hey, anything's possible!'
Will HTML5 lure away Windows Phone mobe maker?
Nokia chief exec Stephen Elop has sparked speculation about his company's commitment to its partnership with Microsoft and Windows Phone.
Asked flat out by Spanish daily El Pais if Nokia will produce Android devices, Elop replied "today we are engaged and satisfied with Microsoft, but anything is possible" - an eye-catching …
The 'Digital Economy' in 2012: A big noisy hole where money should be
No free lunches here - unless you're Zuck or Google
Thank the Zuck! We should all remember Mark Zuckerberg as we sing Auld Lang Syne this year. Facebook's photographic landgrab via its freshly acquired Instagram service has helped put some vital perspective onto 2012 - bringing home issues that were abstract or buried by political posturing.
What Facebook is doing is merely what …
Wikipedia doesn't need your money - so why does it keep pestering you?
Special Report 'Excuse me, just a second. Excuse me. Yes you, sir. Excuse me'
It's that time of year again. As the Christmas lights go up, Wikipedia's donation drive kicks off. Wikipedia claims that the donations are needed to keep the site online. Guilt-tripped journalists including Heather Brooke and Toby Young have contributed to Wikipedia in the belief that donations help fund operating costs. …
Google unlikely to get kid-glove treatment THIS side of pond - Euro biz players
All in Almunia's hands... now
European web businesses are unlikely to give up the fight against Google's business practices, according to sources involved in the case. Reports at the weekend suggest that Google was close to reaching a closed door settlement with the FTC which would require it only to make voluntary presentational changes, and relieve it from …
Coming soon to a theme park near you: Shocking ANTI-PIRACY NAG ADS
UK's ho-hum copyright, patent shakeup revealed
While the world's economic powerhouse China uses the muscle of the state to strengthen its intellectual property industries, Britain is apologetic and embarrassed about its own.
This was plainly evident in a dog and pony show this morning starring Business Secretary Vince Cable. The event was staged by officials at the much- …
Musos blast US copyright bods: 'ARTISTS MAKE LOUSY SLAVES!'
Michelle Shocked shocks - You don't want sausage grinder to do WHAT?
The workings of the US Copyright Office rarely provoke a smile let alone a laugh, so brace yourself for this. The agency is shuffling some of its rules, thrown its doors open to the public for comment, and has been livened up by possibly the best submission ever made to any quango.
The office is inviting responses to changes …
Next IPCC climate assessment due 2014 now everywhere online
No particular surprises - have a read yourself
A draft of the United Nations organisation's fifth climate report (IPCC AR5), due to be completed 2014, has been leaked onto the internet.
The International Panel of Climate Change is a time-consuming voluntary process comprising three working groups, that produce the three blockbuster reports (on physics, impacts, and …
Apple confirms Amazon ebooks bendover, EU watchdog drops bone
Bezos tosses up grappling hook, climbs into walled discount garden
Four of the major publishers – Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and the Hachette Book Group – and Apple have agreed to pacify Eurocrats by changing their electronic book terms. The offer, discussed here back in September, was formally accepted yesterday.
The agreement prohibits conditions introduced by publishers in …
Frack me! UK shale gas bonanza 'bigger than North Sea oil'
Analysis Extraction to restart ... until the next tiny tremor
The government has given the go-ahead for further exploration of the UK's shale gas reserves. Independent surveys suggest these reserves may yield more energy for the nation than North Sea oil.
The shale gas will be collected using induced hydraulic fracturing, known as "fracking", which splits rocks thousands of feet below …
Is this the sleek new BlackBerry mobe that will save RIM jobs?
Photo QNX pocket-stroker pics emerge ahead of January launch
A gallery of the first BlackBerry handset running RIM's new QNX-powered operating system has spilled onto the interwebs. Portions of the device, which are awaiting approval from mobile network operators, have been glimpsed for several months - but this is by far the fullest detail available.
The photos reveal a lush high-end …
Revealed: The Brit-built GRAVITY-powered light that costs $5
Vid From the department of 'why didn't I think of that!'
An ingenious gravity-powered light source has reached its first funding goal in four days. Co-invented by industrial designer Martin Riddiford - who crafted Psion's hardware - the cheap kit allows an LED to be run for 30 minutes from a three-second pull on a rope. Gravity does the rest.
The GravityLight was devised with …
OMG: RIM adds VoIP to its stealth social network
You down with OTT? Yeah you know me
As of today teenagers and other BlackBerry users will be able to make free voice calls to each other - if they're on RIM's stealth 'social network in hardware', BBM.
RIM announced the news last month, but the updated app is now available in its App World store. Users of version 7 of BBM version 7 will be able to make calls over …
Review: Samsung Series 9 super slim notebook
An ideal Win 7 machine, get it while you can
Samsung has taken an expensive legal hit from Apple over copying design elements in the iPhone. Yet with the Series 9, Samsung has created something a bit special. The entire Ultrabook concept took its inspiration from the Apple MacBook Air, of course. But Samsung's Series 9 has developed a confident design language of its own …
Another Usenet download haven axed, Leeds pirates avoid jail
Legalmovies.tv wasn't actually that legal
Two Leeds brothers behind the pirate download links website filmzzz.com have received suspended prison sentences for copyright infringement.
The men, Faraz Saddiq, 27, and Ayaz Saddiq, 26, also operated legalmovies.tv and presented both online outlets as legit operations. In reality, the websites merely pointed to unlicensed …
TVShack's Richard O'Dwyer sent home with £20,000 fine
Extradition swerved
Richard O'Dwyer, the Briton who ran one of the world's most popular download links websites, must cough up £20,000 after avoiding extradition in a bargain with US authorities.
The GP's son will pay the sum under a "deferred prosecution agreement". He voluntarily flew out to New York from Blighty for his court hearing yesterday …
Google defames Reg columnist Verity Stob
Auto-trawled headshot too AWFUL to contemplate
Google’s latest improvement to its web search has produced a catastrophic consequence. The Chocolate Factory now adds biographical information to the search result for a person, drawing on the fantastically accurate well of truth that is Wikipedia, and also adding Google’s best guess of an identifying photograph.
When it works, …
Windows Phone 8 must be Microsoft's priority one, two AND three
Analysis Woe betide Nokia if Redmond can't keep its smartphone promises
Unless Microsoft gives Windows Phone some urgent attention, all of its hard work will go up in smoke and take Europe's largest technology company with it.
We've now seen Windows Phone 8 running on four strong handsets - two each from Nokia and HTC - and it's fair to say the manufacturers have kept their side of the bargain. HTC …
Nokia uncloaks Lumia 620: A 'budget' $249 Windows 8 mobe
Smaller screen, less RAM, smaller battery - you get the picture (which is smaller too)
Nokia has announced its third Windows Phone 8 mobile, the sixth from any manufacturer to use Microsoft’s new operating system. Priced at $249 (£154) SIM-free, the Lumia 620 is a diminutive "budget" model with a 3.8in screen, parking it at the rather pricey end of where the budget market it is today.
The 620 includes a microSD …
