US government wants security research on car-to-car nets
Car crashed? Have you topped up its anti-virus or turned it off and on again?
David Strickland, Administrator of the USA's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), has told that nation's Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation that he plans to research the security requirements of automated cars and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) networks.
Strickland appeared before the …
Foxconn still flogging iWorkers, but more lightly
Fair Labor Association finds better safety, more loos, but also overwork
The Fair Labor Association's (FLA's) latest report on workers at Chinese manufacturer Foxconn, Apple's preferred source for many iThings, has found many staff are still working longer hours than is allowed under Chinese law.
The report (PDF) is based on audits of Foxconn plants in Guanlan, Longhua and Chengdu. The report was …
Yahoo! May! Buy! Tumblr! For! One! BEELLION! Bucks!
Hipster favourite could make Yahoo! cool again
Yahoo! has reportedly opened its chequebook, pencilled in nine zeroes with a one in front, and waved it around in the general direction of blogging site Tumblr.
Adweek says Yahoo! is willing to write the billion-dollar cheque because Tumblr is so cool it will excite advertisers.
The Wall Street Journal quotes Yahoo! officials …
Australia's net filter sneaks into operation through back door
Regulator's ban on dodgy shares site wipes out hundreds, exposes censorship mechanism
Australia's national internet filter has re-emerged as an incompetence-powered zombie, after the nation's corporate regulator mistakenly blocked access to hundreds of sites.
The regulator in question is the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), which says its role is “ensuring that Australia’s financial …
Gartner chap slams gov-funded IT education boosts
IT is not a beautiful or unique snowflake and does not deserve help
Government spending to develop folks with the IT skills business wants is a waste of time and money, according to Gartner analyst Rolf Jester.
Australia-based Jester popped out a blog post carrying that opinion today, in response to the release of Australia's annual federal Budget.
The release of that document is always a cue …
Verizon starts selling VMware's split personality phones
Bring your own device provided it's one of these two Androids
VMware has notched up a significant achievement in its quest to reduce its dependence on server virtualisation - by striking a partnership with Verizon Enterprise that gives its BYOD-ware Horizon Suite a better chance of finding its way into users' hands.
VMware is mad for what it calls end-user computing, largely because growth …
Tech startups, Silicon Valley, not all they're cracked up to be
Business think tank finds $100m companies more likely to emerge in other places, sectors
Technology startups are not quite the growth engine they're assumed to be, according to a 30-year study by economic think-tank the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.
The Kaufmann Foundation, to give the organisation its commonly-used short name, happily describes itself as “the world's largest foundation devoted to …
Bing uncloaks Klingon translator
'Dujeychugh jagh nIv yItuHQo', says Redmond to Google
Microsoft's ongoing efforts to top Google have seen it approach the final frontier, with a new service that translates written text from various terrestrial languages into the fictional language of Star Trek's Klingon race.
The translator service will also be available from Bing's Windows Phone app.
The introduction of the …
Australia's 2013/2014 budget full of sci/tech goodies
Cash for gamers, ERP reviews and nuclear waste handling
Australia's budget for 2013/2014 contains plenty of interest to the technology community.
One of the Budget's centrepieces is $AUD9.8 billion of funds, over six years, with the aim of ensuring “Australia to be placed in the top five countries internationally in reading, mathematics and science by 2025”. That investment in maths …
Budget could mean more paperwork for contractors
Sole traders may have to pay tax monthly, not quarterly
Australia's 2013/2014 budget could mean extra work for IT contractors.
Such workers are often considered “sole traders” or “independent contractors” for tax purposes and are currently required to submit quarterly payments for the goods and services tax (GST) and personal income tax. Australia has around 750,000 independent …
Torvalds unveils first Linux 3.10 release candidate
Download, then be nice to your mother, Linux Lord advises
The first release candidate for version 3.10 of the Linux Kernel is upon us.
Linus Torvalds released RC1 of the new kernel on the eve of Mother's Day (in North America and Australia), together with some advice on how to treat Mum/Mom right on the occasion.
“So this is the biggest -rc1 in the last several years (perhaps ever) at …
Drone to deliver beer-as-a-service
GPS-guided Octocopter to parachute cans into South African music festival
Organisers of South Africa's OppiKoppi Music Festival are promising attendees the chance to order a beer and have it parachuted out of a drone and into the campground.
The festival takes place from August 8th to 10th. The lineup is dominated by local acts and therefore doesn't look like it's worth booking a flight to South …
Amazon launches own currency
Web bazaar now 'coining it', for self and devs
Amazon.com has started printing its own money.
The company's effort, dubbed Amazon Coins, will be familiar to anyone that has acquired Microsoft Points or Nintendo Points, as the Coins require consumers to stump up real-world cash in return for a balance of online-only credit tied to a single store. Coins can be spent in Amazon' …
Google pools cloud storage
Limits to inbox size are no more
Google has changed its approach to cloud storage, with individuals and business users of its apps now offered a pool of storage rather than silos dedicated to different services.
Announced in an inevitable pair of blog posts, the Chocolate Factory is calling the new arrangement “unified storage”. Storage wonks wondering why …
Analysts brawl over 'death' of markup language
Help us out here – does XACML matter?
XACML doesn't exactly roll off the tongue or set hearts racing – El Reg has seen fit to mention it one whole time in our web history.
But the standard, which reached version 3.0 in January 2013 and is billed as an authentication-enabler “that describes both a policy language and an access control decision request/response …
Obama orders gov data must be 'open and machine-readable'
Get busy, US government IT folk, you've got six months to show progress
US President Barack Obama has issued an Executive Order, decreeing that “Government information shall be managed as an asset throughout its life cycle to promote interoperability and openness, and, wherever possible and legally permissible, to ensure that data are released to the public in ways that make the data easy to find, …
ZX Spectrum cassette player lost? There's an app for that
Retro gone screechingly mad
Those with a working ZX Spectrum in their cupboards but lacking a working cassette deck with which to load programs need fret no more: there's an app for that.
The app in question, Speccy Tape for iOS, allows users to access the World of Spectrum database of abandonware. Once loaded into an iOS device, it then plays back the …
AT&T drops Facebook phone to 99 cents
Home is where the apathy is as $99.99 price slashed by 99 per cent
Facebook's long game looks to be an attempt to create a shadow web by making the site a reasonable substitute for almost anything one does online.
Why wade through Reddit when your friends share content on Facebook? Or bother with Flickr or Picasa when Facebook will store your snaps? Messaging also happens quite happily within …
India joins list of nations vetting Huawei, ZTE
Report says new lab will test all “foreign” telecom kit
India has joined the list of countries concerned about allowing the installation of telecoms kit from Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE.
The USA has banned the pair from winning contracts connecting phones from sea to shining sea, citing security concerns (although many feel its real worry is protecting local companies). …
Annular solar eclipse LIVE!
PICS 'N' VID The sun is a mass of incandescent gas and the moon's in the way
Today, folks living in remote parts of Australia's north and some Pacific islands will experience an annular eclipse, the type of eclipse just one grade below a total eclipse.
That means the sun will just remain visible as the moon passes between it and Earth.
The result will be a view of a “ring of fire” as Sol's hellish …
Melbourne IT admits hack, says 'twas but a flesh wound
Report says Oz outfit hacked to harm Twitter's DNS
Australian domain registrar Melbourne IT admits “an unauthorised third party” has attacked the company, but says the incident was minor.
Domain name registrars have been copping it of late, with name.com yesterday forced to reset its customers' passwords after an attack and Linode taking the same precaution in mid-April.
Online …
'No discernible increase in piracy' from DRM-free e-books
SciFi imprint Tor UK's verdict on a year without copy restrictions
A little over a year ago, Speculative Science Fiction publisher Tor decided to do away with digital rights management (DRM) for its e-books.
The company's publisher Tom Doherty said that the time that authors were supportive because DRM frustrates readers. “It prevents them from using legitimately-purchased e-books in perfectly …
TARDIS materialises in Sydney
Whovians rather less excitable than Apple fanbois as Who merch store opens
A bright, early, morning, a long line of fans queued outside a soon-to-open shop, and a Reg reporter.
No, dear readers, you haven't missed an iPhone release, but instead the public emergence of the Dr Who pop-up store, a merchandise outlet erected by the avaricious cunning folk at BBC Licensing, who've decided to give Australian …
'Ring of fire' eclipse to burn Australia
Tune in from 22:00 GMT May 9th for the non-Johnny-Cash-related cosmic action
Sol and Luna's eternal cosmic dance reaches one of its regular peaks tomorrow, when an annular eclipse will be visible from Australia, Papua New Guinea, and several small Pacific nations.
Annular eclipses are known as “ring of fire” eclipses, because while the sun and moon line up Luna appears smaller than the sun, leaving a …
BitTorrent goes straight (to email hell) with 'Bundles'
New format marries web apps with torrents
BitTorren's ongoing efforts to convince the world it's not just a tool for evil have produced “Bundles”, a “new type of torrent file where fan interaction, like email collection or donation, happens inside the torrent.”
BitTorrent says Bundles can make “every single piece of content could function as a flyer, and a standalone …
Oz chap blows his own Google Glass
'FLASS' uses Android, Bluetooth, tiny screen pinched from video goggles
A 20 year old Australian tech support chap named Nathan Myers has built his own version of Google Glass.
Dubbed “FLASS”, a contraction of “fake Google Glass”, the device uses a screen pinched from a MyVu Crystal 701, a short-lived late noughties gadget that tried to convince the world to watch video in a pair of glasses whose …
FTTN cabinet survives Kiwi car crash
Update Malcolm Turnbull's FTTN NBN plan now proven to be physically robust
Maclolm Turnbull will be smiling today. The communications spokesperson for Australia's opposition recently advanced a fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) plan for the nation's multi-billion National Broadband Network. That plan calls for tens of thousands of roadside cabinets to be constructed as the node to which fibre connects, before …
Windows Blue preview to land at end of June
Redmond also plans Android access to Office WebApps
Start-button refugees wandering through the wasteland of Windows 8 trying to find a way to open an application can circle June 24th in their calendars, after Microsoft let it be known that a “public preview” of Windows Blue will emerge at the end of June.
Microsoft's leaking hints that Blue will bring back the Start button, but …
Don't bake your Raspberry Pi - now you can WATER COOL it
Pic Brit's compressed cooler for turbo-charged micro PCs
The Raspberry Pi is supposed to help teach kids how to code, but one Londoner has used it to learn how to fabricate a water-cooling rig, after building a liquid-filled radiator to cool his Pi.
Does a Pi need water cooling? The device can certainly be overclocked, and its designers, the Raspberry Pi Foundation, last year added a …
BMC successfully sells self
Private equity mob shells out $US6.9bn for management software outfit
Enterprise software company BMC has agreed to be acquired by a troika of private equity companies, who will hand over $US46.25 of cash for each outstanding share in the company.
$6.9bn will therefore change hands to make the company the joint property of Bain Capital, Golden Gate Capital, GIC Special Investments and Insight …
Politically-correct 'Fairphone' goes on pre-sale next week
Evil-free recyclable mobe uses ethical ingredients, fair labor practices ... and Android
Fairphone, a social enterprise aiming “to bring a fair smartphone to the market – one designed and produced with minimal harm to people and planet” will next week offer pre-sales of its first handset, and if it can find 5,000 buyers the phone will become a reality.
The Fairphone's design calls for it to use minerals sourced from …
We've done it - we've gone and made LONG-LIFE BEER
Boffins breed 'defective' enzyme to extend tipple's shelf life
Researchers at Australia's University of Adelaide have unlocked the secret to letting beer age without it tasting like old socks.
Doctor Jason Eglington of the university's School of Agriculture, Food and Wine explained that barley contains an enzyme called “lipoxygenase”. The enzymatic process produces several substances, among …
BMC on the private equity block
$US6.5bn sale expected this week
“Please don't call us a middleware company” BMC is reportedly close to being acquired in a $US6.5bn deal arranged by Bain Capital and Golden Gate Capital Corp.
Financial press have tracked the deal for almost a month, but things now seem to be getting close to the moment at which prestigious pens reach paper, as Reuters roused …
Debian 7 debuts
Wheezy wheels out with extra cloud power
Debian 7, which glories in the code name “Wheezy”, is officially upon us.
The latest iteration of Ian Murdock's brainchild emerged on Saturday, which given it is created by volunteers seems a very apt time at which to appear. Wheezy is the first update to the OS in two years.
Debian's developers are talking up two features in …
Monitor-makers ponder Android-powered touch screens
Touchy 21-inchers on the agenda, says analyst
Anyone fancy a 21-inch touch screen monitor with an ARM CPU and enough computing grunt to run Android? For about twice the price of a conventional monitor?
Taiwanese analyst outfit WitsView says monitor-makers are considering just such a gadget as a way to fix the sales slump in the display industry. That slump is in part caused …
NBN rollout to reach 1.3m new premises by late 2016
NBN Co and Minister offer different descriptions of construction deadline
The timetable for rollout of Australia's national broadband network (NBN) has been updated. The nation's terminal-looking government, which faces an election on September 14th, has unveiled plans to provide an additional 1.3m premises with a fibre to the premises (FTTP) connection by December 2016.
A canned statement about the …
US Ambassador plays Game of Thrones with pirates
Obama's man in Canberra conducts Facebook Diplomacy
The United States of America's Ambassador to Australia has taken to Facebook to protect one of America's critical industries: the making of gory television serials.
Jeffrey L Bleich, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, appears to have noted that Australians are very keen on the HBO series Game of Thrones. Vulture South …
BlackBerry 10 passes US defence department tests
Military happy Z10 and Q10 allow chat on the Q.T.
BlackBerry has secured access to a critical market – the US military – for its new operating system and handsets and version 10 of its Enterprise Service software.
Sighs of relief at the news may well be rattling the windows at BlackBerry's headquarters, because the company has staked its future on secure messaging. Winning …
Tech giants reject tax dodge name and shame plan
Apple, Google, Microsoft et al speak through Oz industry body
Australia's plan to name and shame technology companies that use various machinations to reduce the amount of tax they pay down under has been carpeted by the very companies that use such schemes.
Condemnation of the plan has emerged from the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA), Australia's peak technology …
37,000-machine study finds most reliable Windows PC is a Mac
Three months of laptop performance analysis puts Apple on top
A MacBook Pro is the most reliable PC on which to run Windows, according to research from PC-monitoring-as-a-service outfit Soluto.
Soluto users install an agent on their PCs. That piece of software keeps an eye on the PC and sends information to Soluto, which then alerts sysadmins about potential problems so they can act before …
Java applets run wild inside Notes
'Full compromise' possible
Attackers with a desire to rummage around inside the PCs of Notes users can do so merely by sending HTML emails containing a Java applet or JavaScript, IBM has admitted in a security advisory.
Full Disclosure describes the effects as potentially nasty, saying "This can be used to load arbitrary Java applets from remote sources ( …
NetApp's Tour de France quest falls flat
Who wants to be cycling's 'secret sauce' anyway?
When big vendors take on major sporting sponsorships, the first thing that usually happens is lots of shiny happy marketing material about just how the vendor's technology will propel athletes to success.
So when NetApp in 2012 threw its name, technology and cash behind German cycling team Endura the group at the centre of the …
New NASA rover lands in frigid alien hell tomorrow
Welcome to Greenland, GROVER
NASA's newest rover, the Goddard Remotely Operated Vehicle for Exploration and Research (GROVER), tomorrow (May 3rd) starts operations in a frigid alien hell with a climate utterly inimical to human life: the ice sheets of Greenland.
GROVER follows familiar design specs: NASA describes it as “tank-like”, an apt choice of words …
Oracle reveals secret recipe for free DIY storage cloud
How far will the virtual ZFS fun scale?
World+dog may be busy preparing Dropbox clones, but Oracle seems to think a better idea is to build your own domestic cloud storage rig and has therefore published a recipe for doing so.
Naturally the recipe includes lots of Oracle products – VirtualBox, Solaris 11.1 and ZFS are all required - but non-Oracle open source kit also …
Oz volcano's lava lake spills from crater
Steamed walrus, anyone?
Australia's only active volcano is rumbling fiercely, with new NASA photos revealing its lava lake has overflowed its crater.
The volcano in question, Big Ben, is happily located on Mawson Peak in the remote southern reaches of the Indian Ocean on Heard Island, an Australian territory. People only bother to visit Heard and its …
Apple to end support for original iPhone: report
RIP iPhone One, 2007-2013
Support for Apple's original iPhone will end on June 11, according to a report from 9 to 5 Mac which got its hands on an advisory (JPG) sent to Apple shops advising of products the fruity company will no longer support.
Announced in early 2007 and then released in June of that year, the first iPhone's breakthrough feature …
Pirates scoff at games dev sim's in-game piracy lesson
Dev seeds cracked version of 'Game Dev Tycoon', watches as Pirates run rampant
Australian games developer Greenheart Games has released a cracked version of its own product – a games business simulation called “Game Dev Tycoon” – as an experiment in education of pirates and their reaction to a game that tells them their software-pinching ways are evil.
The startup outfit detailed its exploits here, …
Pivotal a 'cult' led by charismatic visionaries
Asian head says talks already under way with VCE
Pivotal, the EMC-and-VMware spinout, is no ordinary company but is instead akin to a “cult”, according to Melissa Ries, the company's general manager for Asia Pacific and Japan.
Ries' domain covers nations including Australia, India and Taiwan and about 15 per cent of the company's 1250 staff. Most are in pre-sales, sales or …
Google Now lands on iOS
Siri: What's it like to have competition in your backyard?
Google has released its signature search app, Google Now, on Apple's iOS.
Google's search apps have been on iOS for years and have included voice search for quite some time. The new release is notable inasmuch as it brings some of Google's more advanced search services that resemble, challenge or surpass Apple's own voice-driven …
Harassed Oracle worker to appeal costs, damages decisions
Lawyers 'incredibly supportive concerning my legal fees'
The case of Australian Rebecca Richardson, the former Oracle employee who won an $18,000 settlement after being sexually harassed by a colleague, will return to court in an attempt to overturn a decision that Richardson must pay some of her harasser's costs. The appeal will also seek a new damages award.
As we have reported …
