NSA: NOBODY could stop Snowden – he was A SYSADMIN
The US National Security Agency may have some of the most sophisticated cyber-surveillance programs in the world, but it was trivial for former NSA contractor Edward Snowden to walk off with sensitive data, sources say, owing to the agency's antiquated internal security.
"The [Defense Department] and especially NSA are known for …
US mobile app dominance threatened by ANGRY BIRDS revolution
The US is still a dominant force in mobile app development worldwide, but that could be changing, based on the latest data from app analytics outfit Flurry – and a certain Finnish firm could be leading the way for the rest of the world.
US-based developers produced 36 per cent of all active mobile apps as of June 2013, according …
Tor usage up by more than 100% in August
The privacy-enhancing Tor network has seen its total number of users per day more than double in the last month, reaching the highest levels since the project first began compiling usage statistics.
Graph of Tor users for August 2013 Tor traffic was up all over the globe in August 2013 – and we do mean up (Source: Tor Project …
3D printed guns are for wimps. Meet NASA's 3D printed ROCKET ENGINE
Weapons enthusiasts have been experimenting with 3D-printed guns for months, with mixed results. But NASA has set its sights much higher – quite literally – having successfully tested 3D-printed parts under the torturous conditions of rocket engines.
The most recent such test took place on August 22, the space agency revealed on …
Intel ships high-powered C++ compiler for native Android apps
Intel has released the Intel C++ Compiler v13.0 for Android OS, its first attempt at delivering an optimizing C/C++ compiler designed specifically for Google's mobile platform.
The release is notable for a number of reasons. First, the overwhelming majority of Android devices are currently built around chips based on the ARM …
BlackBerry in talks to spin off Messenger division
Struggling smartphone maker BlackBerry is seriously considering spinning off its BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service into its own, subsidiary company, according to reports.
The Wall Street Journal claims the new company would be called BBM Inc., and would operate with greater autonomy than the BBM division does now, citing the …
Microsoft: YES Windows 8.1 is finished, but NO you can't have it
Microsoft says it has already begun seeding the final code of Windows 8.1 to its manufacturing partners, but that doesn't mean you'll be able to get your hands on the update any sooner.
In a blog post on Tuesday, Windows corporate VP Antoine Leblond said that while hardware makers are being given time to incorporate Windows 8.1 …
Wall Street traders charged with stealing company code via email
Three men have been charged with pilfering trade secrets from a Wall Street firm after two of them emailed themselves computer code belonging to their former employer from their company email accounts.
Glen Cressman and Jason Vuu, both former employees of Wall Street firm Flow Traders, were each charged with unlawful duplication …
Botched court doc outs Google as respondent in national security flap
An error by the US Department of Justice's document-redaction staff has inadvertently let slip a secret that the DoJ has spent months battling in the courts to protect – albeit one that will come as a surprise to no one.
The DoJ has long maintained that the practice of using National Security Letters (NSLs) to obtain information …
What Surface RT flop? Nokia said to be readying WinRT slab for September
New reports have emerged suggesting that Nokia is planning to boldly go where other device makers fear to tread: the Finnish firm is reportedly planning to release a tablet running Microsoft's ill-fated Windows RT operating system.
Murmurs that Nokia is working on a Surface RT competitor have been buzzing around for months now, …
Guardian teams up with New York Times for future Snowden GCHQ coverage
Faced with a mounting backlash from UK authorities, The Guardian newspaper has announced that it will collaborate with The New York Times to release further documents detailing the activities of the UK's Government Communications Headquarters.
"In a climate of intense pressure from the UK government, the Guardian decided to …
Google plonks down cash for Foxconn's head-mounted display patents
Google has snapped up a parcel of patents from Hon Hai Precision Industry, the Taiwanese electronic manufacturer more commonly known as Foxconn, in a move seemingly designed to bolster its Glass headsets against potential competitors.
In a statement obtained by The Wall Street Journal, Hon Hai described the patents sold to the …
Government intervention unlikely for beleaguered BlackBerry
Struggling Canadian smartphone maker BlackBerry shouldn't expect any help from the government, a prominent cabinet minister has indicated.
Although he acknowledged that BlackBerry is having "a hard time" with its latest products, Canadian Minister of Industry James Moore told Bloomberg, "It's for them to engage the market and …
Xerox begins rolling out patches for jumbled-numbers copier glitch
Two weeks after it was first made aware of the problem, Xerox has begun rolling out a fix for a software glitch that caused numbers in documents scanned by certain of its WorkCentre multi-function printers (MFPs) to come up garbled.
"Our engineering team has been working around the clock to deliver the patch," Xerox wrote in a …
Lenovo to ship all new PCs with Start Menu replacement
You wanted the Start menu back in Windows 8.1. Microsoft listened ... and didn't give it to you. Now Lenovo says that if a Start Menu is what it will take to get you to start buying Windows 8 PCs, then by gum, a Start Menu you shall have.
By now, everyone should be aware that the Start icon that's coming to the Windows 8.1 …
Jolla's first Sailfish phone preorders 'fully booked'
Jolla, the Finnish smartphone startup founded by former Nokia staffers, has announced that the first production batch of mobiles based on its incipient Sailfish OS have been "fully booked," and that it expects to begin shipments by the end of the year.
Sailfish, you may recall, is Jolla's commercial variant of the Linux-based …
A single company is responsible for 1 out of 4 BlackBerry apps
It's no secret that sales of the latest BlackBerry handsets haven't been as strong as the Canadian mobile maker had hoped. But if the real strength of an OS platform is in its developer ecosystem, BlackBerry could be on even shakier ground than previously thought.
At the BlackBerry Live event in Orlando, Florida in May, CEO …
US government nabbed $2.9m in May Bitcoin seizure
More information has come to light regarding the US government's recent seizure of funds from online accounts belonging to Mt. Gox, the world's largest Bitcoin exchange.
El Reg reported in May that the Department of Homeland Security had frozen an account with mobile payment processor Dwolla belonging to Mutum Sigillum LLC, a …
Apple's iTunes Radio to launch next month with abundant ads
With the formal launch of iTunes Radio fast approaching, more details have emerged about how Apple plans to make money from its new streaming audio service.
The answer, in a nutshell, is advertising. But according to a report in AdAge on Tuesday, Cupertino has planned a multi-pronged approach that could easily give competitors …
Firefox takes top marks in browser stability tests
Web app testing-as-a-service company Sauce Labs has released its latest browser crash data, and remarkably enough, the least stable web browser today probably isn't the one you think it is.
True, by this metric as by most others, Internet Explorer 6 is the worst browser out there. It topped the crash rankings in Sauce Labs' …
Tiny fireball exoplanet completes one year in 8.5 hours
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered a new, Earth-sized exoplanet for which orbiting its star is literally all in a day's work.
The newly discovered planet, dubbed Kepler 78b, completes one full revolution around its star in just 8.5 hours – fast enough that by the time you clock in at the …
ZTE's $80 Firefox OS mobe sells out on eBay
If you were hoping to get your hands on ZTE's first Firefox OS phone and you don't live in one of the markets where it was picked up by a mobile carrier, you may be out of luck for now.
The Chinese smartphone maker put a limited stock of its new ZTE Open handset up for sale to customers worldwide last Friday, exclusively via its …
Google goes dark for 2 minutes, kills 40% of world's net traffic
You can all relax now. The near-unprecedented outage that seemingly affected all of Google's services for a brief time on Friday is over.
The event began at approximately 4:37pm Pacific Time and lasted between one and five minutes, according to the Google Apps Dashboard. All of the Google Apps services reported being back online …
Google Glass is HIGH FASHION in September Vogue magazine
Let's face it: Google Glass has an image problem. Even people who like the idea are forced to admit that wearing Sergey Brin's high-tech specs in public makes you look like a dork. But there may yet be an antidote to that.
Opening spread of a Google Glass photo shoot from the September 2013 issue of Vogue See? Those Google …
SQUEEEEE! Microsoft goes retro with pay-by-squawk NFC tech
Researchers at Microsoft Research India have proposed a new form of near-field communication (NFC) for mobile phones, one that even works on devices that lack any kind of specialized NFC hardware.
The technique is a modern throwback to the earliest days of computer communications, and a big clue to how it works can be found in …
YouTube Wars: Microsoft cries foul as Windows Phone app pulled again
Microsoft has publicly criticized Google for failing to live up to its commitment to openness, after being told to pull its custom-built YouTube app from the Windows Phone Store for the third time.
YouTube has had a rocky history on the Windows Phone platform. Since early this year, Microsoft's legal team has accused Google of …
More brutal PC numbers from Dell as revenues stay flat, profits sink
Dell announced its second-quarter earnings for fiscal 2014 on Thursday – five days early – and delivered a report that met analysts' expectations but once again showed a company struggling to remain profitable in the face of woeful trends in the PC industry.
This was the second quarter in a row that Dell announced its results …
Java devs warned of pushbutton exploit for buggy Struts framework
Java developers were warned, but they didn't listen. Security researchers at Trend Micro report that old and vulnerable versions of the Apache Struts framework for Java are still in widespread use, and now Chinese hackers are using automated tools to exploit their flaws.
The vulnerabilities in question were patched in the July …
Bradley Manning: 'I'm sorry my actions hurt the United States'
US Army Private Bradley Manning, who in July was found guilty of disclosing hundreds of thousands of classified government documents to WikiLeaks, has apologized in open court for his actions.
The New York Times reports that Manning gave a three-minute, unsworn statement before military court judge Colonel Denise Lind on …
Hackers not responsible for New York Times website wipeout
The website of The New York Times was unavailable for at least an hour on Wednesday morning, but the newspaper says the outage wasn't due to malicious attacks, as some had feared.
The NYT website first went dark around 11:30am Eastern Time and continued to display nothing but a terse "Service Unavailable" error for several hours …
Bitcoin laws are coming: US Senate launches virty currency probe
The heat is on for Bitcoin and other virtual currencies in the US, with lawmakers at the highest levels of government now actively investigating how to regulate the upstart digital monies.
On Tuesday, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs sent letters to a number of prominent federal regulatory …
Peak Apple? HOGWASH! Apple is 'extremely undervalued,' says Icahn
Ever one to keep multiple irons in the fire, corporate raider activist investor Carl Icahn has announced via Twitter that he has taken a major position in Apple, a stock he says he considers "extremely undervalued."
Bloomberg reports that the billionaire's share of the fruity firm amounts to more than $1bn, which sources claim …
Lawsuit claims Microsoft misled investors in Surface RT fiasco
A US law firm has filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of Microsoft shareholders, alleging that Redmond misled investors when it failed to alert them to dismally poor sales of its ARM-based Surface RT fondleslabs.
According to a press release issued by the law firm of Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd on Monday, the suit charges …
Larry Ellison: Google is ABSOLUTELY EVIL, but NSA is ESSENTIAL
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has nothing but praise for the US National Security Agency's domestic surveillance programs, but he's far less kind when it comes to Google – and in particular its CEO, Larry Page, whose behavior he describes as "evil."
"I know his slogan is 'don't be evil,'" Ellison told correspondent Charlie Rose in an …
New York State to investigate 'Wild West' Bitcoin industry
A New York State banking regulator has issued subpoenas to more than 20 Bitcoin-related companies as part of an inquiry into the business practices of the virtual currency industry, The Wall Street Journal reports.
"If virtual currencies remain a virtual Wild West for narcotraffickers and other criminals, that would not only …
Google ups ante to $5,000 for Chrome browser bug bounties
Google has increased the amount it will pay security researchers for information about flaws in its Chrome browser, having already shelled out more than $2m in bug bounties across its various security reward programs.
"In a nutshell, bugs previously rewarded at the $1,000 level will now be considered for reward at up to $5,000 …
ZTE to flog Firefox OS mobe worldwide via eBay
Chinese mobile maker ZTE has announced plans to sell a smartphone running the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox OS worldwide via online auction site eBay.
The company said the orange-colored version of the ZTE Open would go on sale "soon" for $79.99 on eBay's US site and £59.99 in the UK, though no specific date was given.
"The ZTE …
Werner Herzog's latest film warns drivers not to text while driving
Famed German filmmaker Werner Herzog has teamed up with US mobile carrier AT&T to produce a short documentary film, warning of the dangers of texting while driving.
The 35-minute film (embedded below) features frank and occasionally heart-wrenching interviews with drivers who were responsible for traffic accidents after texting …
Study finds online commentards easily duped, manipulated
Internet forums often use reader moderation to determine which comments are the best, but new research suggests that tallying up and down votes for online comments is a poor measure of those comments' actual quality.
Oh, you may think you know who's brilliant and who's a troll in our forums, dear Reg reader – but according to a …
Amazon to ship Android-based gaming console by year's end?
Online mega-retailer Amazon may be planning to release an Android-based gaming console by the end of the year, if rumors prove correct.
Citing "those ... who have knowledge of the in-development hardware," Game Informer claims Bezos & Co. may be readying the device to ship by "Black Friday" – the day after the US Thanksgiving …
Mozilla links Gmail with Persona for email-based single sign-on
The Mozilla Foundation has unveiled a new Identity Bridge that links its Persona single sign-on technology with Gmail, allowing all Gmail users to log in to Persona-enabled sites without entering a username or password.
Persona works by having users register their email addresses with a server called a Persona Identity Provider …
Acer to downplay Windows in favor of Android, Chrome OS
Acer has told investors that it will reduce its emphasis on Windows PCs and laptops over the next few quarters in favor of devices based on operating systems from Microsoft's archrival Google.
The Wall Street Journal reports that that Taiwanese hardware maker plans to grow its "non-Windows business" rapidly, such that Android …
Snowden's secure email provider Lavabit shuts down under gag order
Lavabit, the security-conscious email provider that was the preferred email service of NSA leaker Edward Snowden, has closed its doors, citing US government interference.
"I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by …
Amazon opens Appstore doors to web apps
Amazon has begun accepting web apps and mobile-optimized websites for sale in its Amazon Appstore for Kindle and Android devices, allowing developers to market their HTML-based wares to mobile users in over 200 countries.
"By launching support for HTML5 web apps in the Mobile App Distribution Program, we're giving web developers …
US federal judge: Yes, Bitcoin IS MONEY
A US federal judge has ruled that Bitcoin meets the criteria for "a form of money" under US law, paving the way for what could become a defining lawsuit for the virtual currency.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Texas resident Trendon Shavers with operating a Ponzi scheme under the name Bitcoin Savings and …
Twitter hardens two-factor authentication with app-based secure logins
Barely two months after rolling out two-factor authentication, Twitter has beefed up its login procedures yet again, both to improve security and to make two-factor available to more Twitter users worldwide.
Twitter launched two-factor authentication in late May with a system based on SMS messaging. While that was good enough …
Microsoft unveils push-button app generator for Windows Phone
Microsoft would like to see more mobile apps in the Windows Phone store, and to that end it has launched a new online tool that it claims makes it possible for anyone to build their own app for the Windows Phone platform.
Windows Phone App Studio, now in beta, is a web-based wizard that lets you create your own HTML-based mobile …
Got a couple spare million? Grab an original Monet on Amazon
Amazon.com may have started out selling books, but it soon branched out into CDs, DVDs, software, electronics, apparel, and more. Now the world's largest e-tailer has taken an upscale turn with the debut of Amazon Art, a new online marketplace for fine artworks.
Screenshot of Amazon Art page Your next wall decoration could be ' …
Arrr! Comcast working on new tech to nudge PIRATES to go straight
Comcast, the largest US cable operator and one of the nation's leading broadband providers, is reportedly working on a new approach to copyright-infringement prevention that would favor the carrot over the stick.
Under the proposed plan, customers spotted engaging in illegal downloads would be sent notifications in real time, …
Barbie paints Red Planet pink with NASA-approved Mars Explorer doll
NASA's real-world space program may be mired in funding disputes, but that won't stop American toy company Mattel's iconic fashion doll Barbie from taking to the stars once more, with a new "Barbie I Can Be ... Mars Explorer" edition.
The doll, a collaboration between Mattel and NASA, was released to coincide with the one-year …
