Swedish judge explains big obstacles to US Assange extradition
Wikileaker's bizarre bonking behaviour revealed, along with likely legal escapes
A senior judge from Sweden’s supreme court, Justice Stefan Lindskog, has told an Australian audience that Julian Assange’s argument he cannot stand trial in Sweden without being extradited to the USA is not as black and white as the wikileaker would have us believe.
Lindskog yesterday told an audience at the University of …
USA's H-1B skilled worker visa applications open
Unemployment at 7.7 per cent, but tech workers still wanted
Fancy a few years working in the US of A? If you possess a Bachelor's degree in computing or engineering, can prove skills and experience in the field and have found a stateside employer who wants your talents, get typing, dear reader, because for the next couple of days the USA is taking applications for the H-1B visa.
The H-1B …
China's Beidou satnav will open to mobe-makers
Meanwhile in Europe, Galileo gets a firm fix
China will shortly open its Beidou satnav system to mobile phone makers.
Yang Qiangwen, billed by China's official press agnecy Xinhua as “a leading scientist with the China Satellite Navigation Office”, let it be known that the agency is "… seeking favorable policies and attracting investment to promote the technology for …
Microsoft gives away Windows 8 to Mac devs
Sells out in hours
Microsoft has decided the best way to get Mac-using developers to use Windows 8 for web compatibility testing is to give it away.
Redmond today launched an offer to developers whereby they'd get Windows 8, Parallels desktop virtualisation software and a USB containing both if they make a $US25 donation to a charity through a …
US funds Europa mission
ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS HERE … the money's just for planning
A mission to explore Jovian moon Europa, considered one of the solar system's better candidates to host life thanks to its possession of a liquid water ocean, is now in NASA's sights after the US government last week signed off $US75m in funds to scope a future visit.
The money was allocated in the “Consolidated and Further …
Microsoft releases Exchange 2013 update
Update arrives late after compatibility problems with Exchange 2010 resolved
Exchange admins rejoice: Microsoft has released the first big update for the 2013 version of the mail server and it's ready for you to download and install.
What could possibly go wrong?
Lots, actually, as Microsoft planned the release of “Exchange Server 2013 RTM Cumulative Update 1” for the first quarter of this year. By …
Animal Liberation drone surveillance plan draws fire
Australian farmers not comfortable with aerial observation
Animal Liberation Australia has acquired a drone and plans to fly over farms and film animal cruelty.
Mark Pearson, Animal Liberation's executive director, told The Reg concerned members of the public told him about drones and their potential application capturing aerial surveillance of mistreated animals. Pearson said he put …
Amazon joins Dropbox clones, hints at cloud storage margins
Upgraded consumer storage service undercuts S3 prices how exactly?
Amazon.com has become the latest outfit to decide copying Dropbox is a fine idea, further cloudifying its Cloud Drive with a desktop client that does the usual store 'n' synch between multiple devices while also offering some interesting insights into cloud economics.
The nominally-profitable online retailer has operated Cloud …
IBM socialises Notes mail to stop your yammering
First post-Lotus release assumes you want to spend all day on email
IBM has released its first Big-blue-branded version of Notes, emphasising its social-media-like features and the ability to create “embedded experiences” in a new email client that aims to let you spend more time each day doing email.
Big Blue's desire to have you spend more time using an email client is not an act of sadism. …
Chinese game addict MURDERS girlfriend after she leaves him
Creep steals her credit card to fund all-night game binge
A Chinese man with a gaming addiction has been convicted of murdering his girlfriend in a jealous rage and, after doing the deed, using her credit card to buy more time playing games.
Guangzhou Daily last week reported the case of one Xie Huachang, a Guangdong resident whose girlfriend decided to leave him after she found he …
Microsoft says WinPhone outselling iPhone, BlackBerry
Things are looking bad for Apple in Ukraine and Poland
Windows Phone is outselling the iPhone in seven nations, says Microsoft mouthpiece corporate vice president of corporate communications Frank X Shaw.
“Windows Phone has reached 10 percent market share in a number of countries, and according to IDC’s latest report, has shipped more than Blackberry in 26 markets and more than …
Revealed: Vendors’ worst sales fluff
Gartner's ‘Non-differentiators rarely substantiated with credible evidence’
Reg readers often show little love for analysts, labelling them over-priced prognosticators with tenuous ties to reality.
But a new Gartner blog post on "Useless Sales Pitch Slides" may win back some favour, as it reveals the six worst pieces of meaningless marketing messaging vendors put before the firm, and those to whom they …
Lots more virtualisation, cloud, added to TAFE courses
Students will learn reading data, writing cloud strategies, ‘rithmetic of VDI
Several new subjects on virtualisation and cloud computing will shortly be added to ICA 11, Australia’s national curriculum for vocational education and training in information and communications technology.
ICA 11 defines the curriculum used for courses taught at colleges of technical and further education (TAFEs, a tier of non …
Google improves Chrom’s spel checkr
El Reg's Grammar Lab feeds it teasing typos
The new stable version of Chrome, 26.0.1410.43 m for those of you still counting, has baked in the spell check tech The Chocolate Factory uses when you type in its search dialog.
The results, depicted below, add an “ask Google for suggestions” option. Google’s blog announcing the feature shows that feature helping to explain …
Oz shop slaps browsers with $5 just looking fee
Sign of the times cashes in on comparison shoppers who buy online
A specialty food store in the Australian city of Brisbane has erected a sign insisting it will charge $AUD5.00 ($US5.25, £3.46) to enter the store, refundable if you buy something.
But if you leave the store without buying the store assumes you may be comparing prices to those available online and keeps the cash.
The store in …
CERN re-opens 'Animal Shelter for Computer Mice'
Is the large hadron collector warping time?
CERN has re-opened its “Animal Shelter for Computer Mice”, a place where CERN staff can take mice experiencing ill health and offers a warm and stimulating environment in which they can return to health.
As you'll see from the screen shot below, the Shelter is really an initiative of CERN's security team, which uses it to …
Bill Gates offers big bucks for better condoms
Blue screen of family planning
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has rolled out a new project: a quest to find better condoms, with up to $1.1m for those who can come up with ideas that are a snug fit for some pressing problems.
The quest for a better condom has become one of the Foundation's Grand Challenges in Global Health, a in order to address the …
Curiosity out of safe mode, doing science again
Next challenge: stop the Sun corrupting packets
NASA boffins have diagnosed and corrected the glitch that forced nuclear-powered, laser-packing space tank Curiosity to rely on its spare computer. The rover is now using the spare, but the “A” computer is once again ready for duty if required.
The craft has therefore resumed its analysis on the powdered samples of Martian rock …
Apple buys indoor mapper WiFiSLAM
Oh joy: your iPhone will know where you've shopped
Apple has acquired mapping company WiFiSLAM, in a move one hopes can only improve the quality of its inaccurate and oft-derided maps service.
Terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed, by the sum of $US20m is getting plenty of airtime. So is the acquired company's ability to help Apple create indoor maps, as an AngelList …
Ubuntu support periods slashed
Non-LTS releases to get only nine months after version 2014's 13.04
Ubuntu's Technical Board has decided nine months is long enough to support some new releases of its operating system.
In an online meeting noticed by Phoronix (and available for all-text IRC replay here), the Board decided that “regular” Ubuntu releases will only receive food, water, warm lodgings and security updates for nine …
Wind farms make you sick … with worry and envy
No one feels anything until the lobbyists show up, says public health boffin
Professor Simon Chapman, the public health advocate behind the global push for ugly cigarette packets, has turned his attention to “wind turbine sickness”, the condition caused by infrasound vibrations from the turbines' colossal blades.
Chapman believes the condition is bunk and has co-authored a paper, titled Spatio-temporal …
Microsoft, Adobe, wilt during Australian price gouge grilling
Local leaders struggle with 'price what the market bears' charge
Adobe and Microsoft's Australia's managing directors have both struggled to answer hours of tough questions from Australia's Parliamentary inquiry into IT pricing.
Apple's Tony King was the first witness to front members of parliament for ninety minutes today of MPs today, and acquitted himself well.
Adobe's Paul Robson was …
Apple exec says music labels, Hollywood, 'old fashioned' on copyright
Head of Apple Australia says music, movies, price gouging is Big Content's fault
The head of Apple's Australian operations, Tony King, has told an Australian Parliamentary inquiry into information technology pricing that rights holders of music and filmed entertainment have an “old fashioned” attitude to retailing.
Australia is running the inquiry to figure out why locals often pay more for software, digital …
Google extends trademarks-in-ads policy to whole world
Insert usual blather about search quality and choice as motive
Google has altered its policy on the use of trademarks on AdWords, extending permission for advertisers to use rivals' trademarks in their ads to every nation on earth.
The text ads giant has posted a trademark policy update in which it offers the following explanation for the change:
Google's goal is to provide our users with …
HP re-elects all directors
Billions lost, board absolved
The decisions to acquire Palm, Autonomy and EDS, all of which are hard to qualify as qualified successes, have failed to result in any of Hewlett Packard's board members losing their seats.
The eleven-strong board all survived yesterday's annual general meeting, despite previous rumblings that some were likely to feel …
Another iPhone passcode bypass spell revealed
Turn off Siri, remove SIM, add unicorn blood, phone and contacts are yours
Apple's recent release of iOS 6.1.3, complete with fix for the weird keypress sequence that allowed access to and export of iPhone address books, seems to have been just a little bit futile after a new bug with the same effects emerged.
The source of the new method is someone or something called Vbarraquito, whose youTube …
Insourced staff paid a pittance but don't want to leave
What's more important to you: cash or work/life balance?
After the scourge of outsourcing rampaged across the industry in the 1990s and 2000s, you'd think any news of insourcing would be good news for IT professionals, especially those who prefer to work in a nice, warm, in-house IT department rather than the measure-every-minute world of consultancy.
At Australia's Yarra Valley Water …
EMC2 is now EMC II, too
"Aye aye", skipper, it be time for a name change
EMC has made a telling change to its brand.The company's full name, “EMC2”, is now the master brand for Pivotal, VMware and EMC II. Here's a slide that shows the distinction.
New EMC branding
The new scheme seemingly means EMC, the purveyor of storage hardware and associated software, is now called “EMC Information …
Report: BlackBerry BYOD-ware doesn't pass UK.gov security test
Update But is 'likely' to in future, says GCHQ
BlackBerry Balance, the new feature in BB10 aimed at meeting demand for bring-your-own-device regimes, has been found insufficiently secure for that purpose by Britain's Communications Electronics Security Group (CESG).
The CESG, an offshoot of the British signals and electronic intelligence agency GCHQ, describes itself as "the …
Virty market share race reaches the bend and heeeeere comes Oracle
Gartner says users want VMware alternatives for the 40% of non-virtual workloads
Think virtualisation and it's hard not to think VMware. And Microsoft, which Gartner's vice president and distinguished analyst Thomas Bittman yesterday said has around 19 or 20 per cent of the market, compared to VMware's 75 per cent or so.
Oracle, Parallels, Citrix and Red Hat scrap over the rest of the market, but Bittman …
Storage startups sensible silo sources, says scrutiniser
Gartner says flash startups have a place, if they get the software right
Orthodoxy declares complexity the enemy of an easy-to-manage and effective data centre.
But Gartner's research vice president Roger Cox thinks there's now a reason to use diverse storage systems from diverse vendors, even startups.
Cox's thinking is that different applications need different storage appliances. Big Data, he …
Researchers find cloud storage apps leave files on smartphones
Box.com leaves behind everything needed to download some files
Researchers at the University of Glasgow have found that cloud storage apps that say they send files to the cloud also leave retrievable versions of files on the devices.
The files aren't there for all to see, but do represent a resource useful to forensic investigators or those willing to look hard – for whatever purpose.
The …
Infosec boffins meet to plan nuke plant hack response
International Atomic Energy Agency promises a glowing report
Stuxnet gave the world a graphic demonstration just how high the stakes can be when malware hits machinery.
This week, the world is starting to plan a response to an even scarier incident, in which an online attack is aimed at a working nuclear or radiological facility.
Leading the fight is the International Atomic Energy …
BlackBerry CEO: Our vibrating devices will satisfy most needs
You'll soon tire of hefty laptops 'n' slabs
BlackBerry CEO and President Thorsten Heins has declared the organisation he leads is “not a phone company” but a mobile computing company whose networks and operating system can be used to connect a wide range of devices.
Speaking in Sydney, Australia, at the formal local launch of the new Z10 handset, Heins bridled at …
Are your servers PETS or CATTLE?
Update Cloudy metaphor separates the sheep from the goats
The word “cloud” has become horribly over-used. Your correspondent has even heard hosted PABXs referred to as “cloud telephony”.
There's far worse abuse of the language going on among those attempting to describe highly virtualised and/or abstracted server fleets straddling on-premises servers and servers resident in third-party …
Windows Phone 8 support to end in 2014
Sign of Win Phone update or death knell?
If you're shopping for a new mobe on a two year contract and like the look of a Windows Phone, chances are you'll be compelled to undergo an OS upgrade or face using a handset that's not supported by the end of your deal.
The Reg offers this advice with a tip of the hat to Italian site Plaffo, which pointed out a Microsoft …
Feedly now home to 500,000 Reader refugees
Offers guide to being 'less pretty and more functional' just like Google
RSS reader Feedly says Google's decision to drop its Reader service saw 500,000 people migrate to its services in 48 hours.
In the inevitable blog post, Feedly says “To keep the service up, we 10x our bandwidth and added new servers”, and has declared the following three items its “main priorities over the next 30 days”:
To …
Reg readers reveal MIGHTY DOMESTIC DATA CENTRES
Servers’n’sofas challenge reveals racks and stacks in the oddest places
A few weeks back VMware’s Mike Laverick told this hack about his home lab and how he used it to further his career. Plenty of you revealed your own home labs in response, so we launched the servers’n’sofas challenge to report on the very best domestic data centres.
We’ve sifted through the responses and can now bring you the …
Boeing outlines fix for 787 batteries
Venting batteries produced 'smoke' that wasn't, no fire, performed as planned
Boeing has outlined plans to improve the performance and safety features of the batteries used in its 787 aircraft, after two of the planes infamously experienced on-board incidents at Takamatsu and Boston, but has stopped short of offering a thorough explanation for just what went wrong.
What is known is that something caused …
Apple tears itself away from iThings to squash Mac OS X bugs
Mountain Lion v10.8.3 lands with 20+ security fixes
Apple may be more interested in phones and watches these days than the 20th century legacy product that is the PC, but has nonetheless issued a new update for the operating system it still offers for the antediluvian machines.
OS X Mountain Lion v10.8.3, to give the update its full name, slipped down the skids today promising, …
Don't buy a Google car: They might stop it while you're driving
Reader removal rage spreads far and wide
Google's decision to shut down its RSS Reader product has set the internet alight with protest and migration plans.
One of the more interesting ripostes to the Chocolate Factory's decision appeared in the Tweet below.
I'm not going to buy a Google car. I can see them shutting down the self drive service when I'm overtaking a …
Nelson Mandela's island prison hell to become game
Win and you become the boss
Computer game violence continues to raise hackles around the world, having been fingered as a cause of gun violence in the USA and suggested as an underminer of civility just about everywhere else.
What to make, therefore, of an imminent game that will simulate nearly two decades of imprisonment and mind-numbing labour on a …
Report says #Facebook #to #adopt #hashtags
Get ready for a SHIFT-fight with Twitter
Facebook is preparing to adopt hashtags, the folksonomy feature beloved of Twitter users and the microblogging service itself.
Hastags grew out of a practice employed by gossipers on Internet Relay Chat (IRC), who used the “#” character to group discussions into channels.
Twitter users started doing the same in around 2007, and …
Groupon deal spam slapped by Australian regulator
When 'unsubscribe' means 'we'll still send you email'
Groupon's troubles just got a little deeper and more widespread, after Australia's Communications and Media Authority (which likes to be called 'the ACMA') issued a “formal warning” that the floundering group buying outfit needs to get its email house in order.
The ACMA issues formal warnings as a prelude to unholstering its …
Fake fingers fool Brazilian biometrics
Whole new frontier for giving someone the finger
Doctors at Ferraz de Vasconcelos hospital in Sao Paulo, Brazil, have reportedly fabricated fake fingers to fool biometric scanners.
The scam came to light on Globo Television, whose text and video report shows one of the fake digits and a disguised interviewee.
Sadly, your correspondent’s Portuguese language skills only extend …
Google shreds Reader in new round of 'spring cleaning'
Update Petition under way, 'Downfall' vid too
Google is killing off Reader, its web-based RSS reading service, as part of its latest round of culling little-used or unprofitable products. A spring clean, if you will.
The service will disappear on July 1st, 2013.
Google’s reason for the termination, revealed in a blog post, follows:
“There are two simple reasons for this …
Take a temp job in Oz and become office pariah
Temporary visas for skilled workers at center of political storm
If you’ve contemplated a year or three working in Australia on a temporary visa, think again. A domestic political storm means the climate for temporary skilled workers is likely to worsen.
Australia escaped the worst ravages of the global financial crisis, experiencing neither a technical recession nor a major bump in …
Oracle’s cloud slowly condenses
Vaporous apps are rising as point products for social big data mobility
Oracle has started touring the world, throwing “CloudWorld” events at which it explains it’s not late to the cloud, but took its own sweet time getting there in good shape.
That was the message at the Sydney event today, where the Big O’s chief communications officer Bob Evans predicted 2013’s “dumbest idea” has already been …
HP, SAP talking HANA-as-a-service
New acronym! IMCaaS (In-memory-computing-as-a-service)
HP and SAP are discussing the possibility of introducing an as-a-service edition of the software giant's Hana in-memory computing product.
Anita Paul, senior director of HP's industry transformation consulting practice for Asia Pacific and Japan today told The Reg she will shortly meet SAP to discuss creating the service. …
Microsoft exec selling his Surface tablet
Not dumping, upgrading
Just when you thought enthusiasm for Windows 8 and the Surface tablet could not possibly get any more tepid, a Microsoft New Zealand employee intends to sell one of the devices.
Kiwi tech news site spotted Techday spotted a Tweet from Nigel Parker, leader of Microsoft New Zealand's Developer & Platform Group at Microsoft New …
