HP promises software-defined networking 'ecosystem' and app store
HP has nailed its colours to the mast of the good ship software-defined networking (SDN), today outlining plans to create a multi-vendor ecosystem and an app store.
Morten Illum, HP's AsiaPac and Japan veep and general manager for networking, explained HP's plans to The Reg by offering up an example of a user firing up a video …
Barmy Army to get Wi-Fi to the seat for cricket's Ashes
Reg-reading Barmy Army members headed to Australia for the return Ashes* test cricket series will find a marvellous combination of cricket and technology await them during the series' fourth match, after the Sydney Cricket Ground (SCG) announced it will introduce WiFi to the seat.
Details of exactly what is on offer, and how …
Yahoo! Pays! Paltry! $12.50! Bug! Bounty! For! Nasty! Email! Vuln!
Yahoo! has paid a bug bounty to security researchers who found a bug that “allowed any @yahoo.com email account to be compromised simply by sending a specially crafted link to a logged-in Yahoo! user and making him/her clicking on it.” But the bounty was just $US12.50 and came in the form of a voucher that could only be spent in …
Google adds Large Hadron Collider tunnel to Street View
Google has dragged is Street View imaging kit to Switzerland, then lugged it beneath the earth to capture images of the tunnel containing CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Sadly the images don't quite let you be the atom, instead offering the chance to trundle through the LHC's long and monotonous tunnel.
CERN's head of …
Windows 8 fans out-enthuse Apple fanbois
Fanbois and Fandroids often attract derision for their slavish devotion to their preferred kit, but may just have been put in the shade by dedicated followers of … Windows 8.
Yes, you read that right. Windows 8 has dedicated followers. Or to use Microsoft's wording, “our most enthusiastic customers”.
The verbiage above comes …
SpaceX Falcon boosts to glory from Vandenberg space force base
Internet zillionaire Elon Musk has carried out a successful test of his Falcon rocket, launching from the US military space-plex at California's Vandenberg airforce base even as the delayed Cygnus capsule from rival private-space contender Orbital Sciences overcame a software glitch to successfully dock with the International …
VMware vSAN test pilots: Don't panic but there's a chance of DATA LOSS
VMware's vSAN isn't just giving storage appliance vendors a lot to worry about: it's also giving users plenty to consider because it erases data under some circumstances.
Panic not, gentle readers: the tool is in beta and Virtzilla's engineers are onto the problem. But the problem is out there, and VMware has been kind enough to …
F-16 fighter converted to drone
Kids aspiring to become fighter pilots just had their hopes and dreams crushed that little bit more, after Boeing successfully converted an F-16 Fighting Falcon into a pilot-less aircraft.
The newly-designated QF-16 had been retired by the US Air Force before Boeing acquired it, restored it airworthy condition and rigged it up …
Microsoft lures punters to hybrid storage cloud with free storage arrays
Microsoft is giving away its StorSimple arrays to customers willing to spend up big on Azure services.
Microsoft acquired StorSimple in October 2012. The company made more or less vanilla iSCSI SAN, but could also dump data intro the cloud and present that data to servers as if it were a local resource.
StorSimple arrays can …
New digital curriculum draft softens CompSci emphasis
A new work-in-progress draft of Australia's draft Digital Technologies curriculum contains many edits that respond to industry criticism of previous efforts as overly dependent on computational thinking and too vague for teachers to implement.
The curriculum is Australia's first effort at embedding computing in schooling from …
Boffins debate killing leap seconds to help sysadmins
Boffins from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the International Bureau of Weights and Measures ( known as the BIPM for its French name: Bureau International des Poids et Mesures) have met to discuss redefining time.
Specifically, they're keen to redefine Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the international …
VMware to customers: STOP INSTALLING OUR SOFTWARE! NOW!
In a move likely timed to coincide with the opening of Oracle OpenWorld, VMware has made vSphere 5.5 available for download here - but the release of the latest version of its flagship product has been marred by the issuance of a warning to users of vSphere Replication 5.1 NOT to install 5.5.
vSphere Replication is a business …
Oracle hides ExaLogic price cut
Oracle has removed the blog post we noticed last week in which it announced the price of its Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software (EECS) had been cut from $US20,000 per CPU to half that price.
Keen-eyed readers noticed that our link to Oracle's post (which was once to be found here) now produces only Oracle's stylish 404 page.
Big …
Deep Impact succumbs to 'HAL bug' as glitch messes with antenna
NASA has stopped trying to contact Deep Impact, the comet-pronging probe that in 2005 dropped an “impactor” the size of a coffee table onto comet Tempel-1.
The space agency's explanation for the decision will be familiar to anyone that has read or watched 2001: A Space Odyssey: a software glitch means the spacecraft can't point …
Google smacks Surface with free Quickoffice for Android, iOS
Google has reduced the price of its Quickoffice tool to nothing on Android and iOS, a move Microsoft won't appreciate.
Google scooped up Quickoffice about a year back and made it a part of Google Drive. Doing so meant Drive users could edit Microsoft Office documents.
The Chocolate Factory has now made Quickoffice available at …
First look: Apple iPhone 5S and 5C
Apple has a weird problem. Way back in 2008 when it launched the iPhone 3G it just about nailed the spec of a great smartphone.
The iPhone may have grown, acquired an extra camera and sped up in the years since, but its hardware and software user interfaces remain essentially unchanged. Each new model therefore feels incremental …
TPG flashes cheeky 'down under' CAPTCHA
Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, aka those CAPTCHA things you see on websites, raised hackles the other month for being less-than-useful for the disabled.
An Australian Reg reader has since found one with the potential to get the won't-somebody-please-think-of-the-children? crowd upset …
Brits are world's most wired drivers, says fleet tracker CEO
The United Kingdom's roads are so bad that the nation has become the world's strongest adopter of fleet management technology, says to TJ Chung, CEO of logisitics software-as-a-service (SaaS) outfit Navman Wireless.
Navman Wireless carved itself out of parent company Navman, which specialises in hardware. The spin out is more …
Qualcomm turns back hands of Toq smartwatch
Qualcomm isn't entering the smartwatch business after all.
Two weeks ago the company fired up a fancy website that offers the chance to “Be the first to know when Qualcomm Toq is available for purchase” and generally hinted at a grand future for the device.
Since that page went live, Taiwan-based tech outlet VR-Zone met …
Fanbois shun 'crappy plastic' iPhone 5C
Fanbois have once again queued to obtain the new iPhone in Australia, where an accident of time zones means punters willing to do without sleep can be among the very first in the world to play with Apple's latest.
The Reg dropped in to Apple Store Broadway, a Cupertinian outpost in a small mall on the fringe of Sydney's central …
Apple brings iCloud bookmark sync to Windows
Apple today issued iOS 7, bringing with it the usual complaints of clogged networks and imperfect installs.
But the company also slipped out a pair of browser plugins that bring the bookmark-synchronisation functions of its iCloud service to the Chrome and Firefox browsers. iCloud is baked into MacOS, so the extensions are aimed …
Apache Foundation embraces real time big data cruncher 'Storm'
The Apache Foundation has voted to accept the “Storm” real time data processing tool into its incubator program, the first step towards making it an official part of the Foundation's open source offerings.
Storm aims to do for real time data processing what Hadoop did for batch processing: queue jobs and send them off to a …
Oracle halves cost of ExaLogic middleware platform
Oracle has halved the cost of its Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software (EECS), an offering it says is “the unique set of software components, tools, and documentation required to make the Exalogic Elastic Cloud Hardware functional and usable as a platform for Oracle's Fusion Middleware and business applications.”
Announced in a blog …
Microsoft puts something hard and sensitive in your pocket
Microsoft says one of the big selling points for Windows Phone is that some customers like the idea of using its software everywhere.
Redmond imagines customers keen on messaging will run Exchange on Windows Server and then use Outlook or a modern email app under Windows 8 on a PC or fondleslab, and Windows Phone 8 for mobile …
Open ZFS wielders kick off 'truly open source' dev group
A bunch of companies that rely on ZFS to power their products have banded together in a new open source cabal that says it will offer a "truly open source" version of the filesystem.
The group revealed itself to the world yesterday, erecting the eponymous open-zfs.org website and announcing an intention to do the following three …
Australia ponders 160,000-seat ERP possibilities
Australia's government has released an information paper titled “Investigation into optimising ERP Systems across the public service” that will consider how the nation's government can best procure, and wield, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
The release of the information paper (regwalled PDF here should come as no …
Facebook reveals plan to WIRE THE PLANET
Facebook and fellow internet.org members Qualcomm and Ericsson have released a white paper that offers a blueprint for a massively scaled-up internet.
Titled “A Focus on Efficiency” and available here as a PDF, the paper's premise is that internet.org members want to make sure the five billion folks currently offline get the …
Chap unrolls 'USB condom' to protect against viruses
A US-based chap has invented a gadget he's calling a USB condom.
The prophylactic dongle is advanced as protection for the largely hypothetical problem of malware injection from fake USB chargers.
Such polluted ports come in two varieties. The first got an airing at Black Hat, where researchers demonstrated a USB charger that …
Australian pub to serve beers for bitcoin
A 107-year-old Australian pub has decided to accept the world's newest currency: Bitcoin.
Garry Pasfield, publican at The Old Fitzroy in Sydney's bohemian inner city suburb of Woolloomoloo told The Reg he likes the idea of getting in early on Bitcoin. Pasfield said he's no idea if Bitcoin will take off, but likes the idea of …
Google cooks web dev teaching tool for Raspberry Pi
Google has jumped aboard the Raspberry Pi badwagon, releasing an operating system called “Coder” designed to get kids into web development.
Operating system might be flattering Coder a bit, as it offers a constrained environment dedicated to web development and based on Node.JS, which itself is an implementation of Google's V8 …
Microsoft mocks Apple and new iPhones in vids it quickly pulls
Microsoft has posted and then pulled several videos in which it mocks Apple's new iPhones.
The seven videos first appeared over the weekend on the Windows Phone YouTube channel. All have since been made private, but as will happen online various folks pinched copies of the vids so we can all enjoy them. Here's one titled “ …
'Liberator' 3D printed gun enters London's V&A Museum
The Liberator, the 3D printed pistol that debuted earlier this year and quickly earned a ban from The US State Department and The Reg's scorn , has found its way into London's prestigious Victoria & Albert Museum.
The V&A, as the museum is affectionately known, specialises in decorative arts and design. The Liberator falls into …
French ministers told to use only secure comms post-PRISM
French newspaper L'Express has published a memo it says comes from Christophe Chantepy, chief of staff to French prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, and which recommends French cabinet ministers stop using smartphones for phone calls because they are not secure.
The paper's report includes three images of the memo, one for each of …
Torvalds: 'We're not doing Linux95 … for a few years, at least'
The next version of the Linux kernel, version 3.12, has a name: “Suicidal squirrel”.
Linus Torvalds let the new name be known in a Git commit in which he killed off the “Linux for Workgroups” name used for version 3.11.
The Linux Lord has not, however, entirely ruled out returning to Microsoft-themed names for future versions …
Lip-wobbling boffins: Eating Chinese food is like kissing a vibrator
Food boffins have found that eating Szechuan pepper, an ingredient commonly found in Chinese food, produces the same sensations as those experienced when using a vibrator.
So says a paper titled Food vibrations: Asian spice sets lips trembling from the Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences.
The University …
Borland's heir Embarcadero says one dev tool can rule them all
Embarcadero Technologies, the development tools outfit that inherited much of Borland's technology, has released a new product it says can produce native apps for four operating systems from a single codebase.
That tool is RAD Studio XE5, released this week, and Embarcadero is claiming it is the first development tool capable of …
Outlook.com adds IMAP, OAuth
Microsoft has added support for Internet message access protocol (IMAP) to Outlook.com, its web-based email service.
Announced first on Reddit and later in a blog post, there's little practical impact in the change, other than posisbly encouraging more developers and users to point their email clients at Outlook.com.
As …
IETF floats plan to PRISM-proof the Internet
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has posted “PRISM-Proof Security Considerations” aimed at making it much harder for governments to implement programs like the PRISM effort whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed as one of the tools in the NSA's spookery toolbag.
The proposal has just one author - Phillip Hallam-Baker of …
European Commission plans net neutrality push
The European Commission (EC) has proposed to enshrine net neutrality in its statute books, with President José Manuel Durão Barroso signalling his intention to adopt the “connected continent” agenda proposed by commissioner for the Digital Agenda and veep Neelie Kroes.
Barrosso yesterday delivered the European Union's State of …
HP dumped from Dow Jones Industrial Average
Hewlett-Packard may still pull more than a hundred billion dollars a year through the door, but that's no longer enough for the company to win a place on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, (DJIA) the venerable and prestigious basket of 30 stocks held to represent a vital sample of American listed companies.
HP's removal from the …
Torvalds suggests poison and sabotage for ARM SoC designers
Help us out here amateur psychologists: Linus Torvalds has just unleashed his second shouty rant in as many days. Do we need to worry, or is the moon in a particular phase that makes this kind of thing more likely? Has Portland's water supply taken a turn for the worse? Or are we simply seeing a frustrated middle aged man …
Google chucks code into MOOCs mix
Google has decided it will join the Open edX project, an effort to create a platform on which to host massively online open courses (MOOCs).
MOOCs took off a couple of years back when some universities started offering free courses online. While the courses did not lead to a degree, the mere fact that institutions of the calibre …
Apple slugs Australia with iPhone tax
Apple's newest iPhones have surprised the world with premium pricing, but that premium is even more noticeable in Australia, where punters will be asked to pay more than US shoppers, even once one takes into account exchange rates.
The Reg looked at prices for unlocked handsets, recorded on Apple's website. We checked out the US …
Five SECRET products Apple won't show today
Apple will this week announce something, probably a new iPhone or two.
But during The Reg's recent travels in Asia we've spotted some Apple products that haven't been the subject of endless rumours. We suspect these products are so secret Apple itself doesn't know about them. But that won't stop us bringing you – and Apple's …
Pair of complete tits sorry for pervy app
The developers behind an app called 'Titstare' have apologised for any and all offences caused by the software.
Titstare went viral yesterday, in the worst possible way, after it was demonstrated at Tech Crunch's Disrupt conference. The app's functionality, such as it is, offers users the chance to take photos of themselves …
Microsoft says axed certificates were FAILING its software biz
Microsoft has admitted that the masters-level certifications it suddenly cancelled two weeks ago weren't delivering the skilled workforce the company needs to make its products a success in the enterprise.
The admission came during a conference call, a recording of which The Register has obtained, staged to engage with those …
Opera unveils iPad-only browser
Opera has released a browser designed specifically for the iPad.
'Coast' dispenses with a 'back' button, an omission Opera argues is sensible because a touch-enabled device shouldn't need one when a leftwards swipe can do the job.
“Websites and apps today invite you to interact in new ways, but browser design for tablets has …
Microsoft's VDI deals make Windows Server cheapest desktop OS
Microsoft's licensing policies for virtual desktops (VDI) include two anomalies that make it cheaper to provide Windows Server to end users.
Those hoping to adopt desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) have problems because hosting companies cannot rent out Windows licences and must serve desktops from dedicated hardware.
Hosting …
Assange fails in bid for election to Australian Senate
Wikileaker-in-Chief Julian Assange's campaign to win a seat in Australia's Senate has almost certainly failed, with the Wikileaks party securing just 0.62 per cent of the nine million votes counted in the nation's election.
Assange has done a little better in the State of Victoria, with his party picking up a little over 25,000 …
Facebook postpones privacy putsch: report
Facebook will wait a little while before adopting changes to its privacy policy flagged last month.
The Los Angeles Times reports that in response to hostile reaction from users The Social Network will hold off introducing new “features” that would have allowed it to use members' faces in advertisements.
Users greatly dislike …
