Top Twenty Stories

Sinofsky shows off Windows 8 on ARM and Office15

Microsoft aims for separate but equal

Windows boss Stephen Sinofsky has ended months of speculation with the first (fairly) detailed drilldown into Windows 8 on ARM (WOA) platform, and says it should be ready for a simultaneous launch with its x86/64 counterpart. Devices running WOA will come with both a Metro touch-based interface and the more traditional desktop …
Microsoft sets date for Windows 8 preview - at mobile shindig

Barcelona, it was the first time that we met

Microsoft will unveil Windows 8 at Mobile World Congress, says an invitation sent out today. The invitation is for a Windows 8 Consumer Preview in Barcelona on 29 February, two days into the industry event. The choice of the world's biggest mobile show as the backdrop for the unveil makes it clear Microsoft is positioning its …
Googorola's desire for iPhone royalties will upset Apple cart

Analysis Moto patents at heart of latest fair licensing row

Google's outline of how it will use Motorola Mobility's intellectual property – should regulators allow the buyout – has sparked fierce debate as pundits worry about how the smartphone patent wars will pan out. Originally, Google's letter to the IEEE, a global standards body, was praised by commentators because it promised …
Google will swap you a box of crisps for your web privacy

Or anything else from Amazon for $25 if you agree to be stalked

Google has revealed exactly how little cash it thinks a user who is willing to "sell" their data to the search giant is actually worth. The answer? $25 for one year of letting the Chocolate Factory happily slurp your data. And that figure isn't even in the form of cold, hard cash. Nope. Amazon gift vouchers are on offer to …
UK.gov: We really are going to start buying open-source from SMEs

Intellect 2012 Groundhog Day again already?

Open source and open standards are the direction for UK government IT, the civil servant leading the government's technology change agenda has said. Liam Maxwell, Cabinet Office director of ICT futures, said Tuesday in London that open source has grown up and it's time to dispel lingering misconceptions about this technology …
What's in the box, Windows BOFH?

Sysadmin blog What lurks inside the Windows admin's toolkit...

Windows is a powerful and complex Operating System (OS). As with any modern OS, it comes equipped with numerous features, utilities, and applications. But Windows' default tools are not always the best widget for the job at hand. The ubiquity of these tools makes them a standard minimal toolkit that Windows administrators can …
FBI investigated Steve Jobs' reality distortion field, LSD use

Sex, drugs and bomb threats

Steve Jobs' drug use, court cases and personality flaws were all investigated by the FBI, as a file released on Thursday reveals. The FBI launched the investigation in 1991 to vet Jobs for a potential post in government under George Bush Snr - an appointment to an advisory committee on foreign trade. It's a popular role for …
Airport bomb Twitter joker in second fine appeal bid

Judges deliberating whether or not to quash conviction

Paul Chambers, the Twitter joker turned misdemeanour conviction martyr, returned to court on Wednesday to launch a second appeal against a conviction over a "threatening message" to blow Doncaster's Robin Hood Airport "sky high". Chambers, 27, posted the notorious micro-blogging message in early January 2010 while the …
How Zuck wields power over Facebook for a few hundred bucks

CEO's voting rights and package exposed

Mark Zuckerberg's effortless swagger into the business world got an airing in public yesterday when Facebook filed more documents to the US Securities and Exchange Commission ahead of the company going public in a few months' time. Just days before the dominant social network submitted its regulatory filing confirming its plan …
AON: Give us cash, we'll emit 10TB holographic cube

They do it with mirrors

Access Optical Networks says it has developed a 1.2TB holographic storage cube that can transfer data at 155MB/sec and last longer than 50 years. Oh, and it's done using mirrors – but no smoke. The storage medium is a 1cm cube of photorefractive lithium niobate crystalline material and the claimed cost/GB is $0.11 in 1,000 …
Vodafone squirrels cash into Blighty nightly as Europe falters

Spain, Italy disappointing - Turkey, India a pleasant surprise

Vodafone's numbers for the tail-end of 2011 show the network doing pretty well, though it admitted husbanding cash back to the UK nightly just to be on the safe side. It won’t surprise anyone that trading in Italy and Spain has been a bit grim lately, and Vodafone hasn't broken the figures out for Greece but it has pulled out …
Google Wallet PIN security cracked in seconds

Luckily no one important is using it

A researcher at website categoriser zvelo has discovered Google Wallet's PIN protection is open to a brute-force attack that takes seconds to complete. And Google is powerless to fix the problem, it seems. The attack is limited to instances where physical access is available, or the phone has been previously "rooted" by the …
Google Wallet falls open after casual hack

Crack the PIN? No, just hit reset

Turns out it's not necessary to decrypt the PIN, or even hack into Google's Wallet, just ask the phone nicely and it will let anyone root though its innards. The flaw was spotted by The Smartphone Champ, and unlike yesterday's efforts which required root access and a modicum of brute force, this hack barely qualifies for the …
Eolas falls at first hurdle in bid to tax browser apps

Google grins at Adobe jury’s verdict

A jury in Texas has ruled against Eolas Technologies in its patent battle to lay claim to the concept of in-browser applications and most plug-ins. Internet luminaries such as Sir Tim Berners-Lee were flown into the small Texas city to testify in Eolas’ case against Adobe – the first time the father of the World Wide Web has …
Google pushes your buttons in its top strip bar - AGAIN

Back+ in+ black+

Google has once again rejigged its user account navigation bar, making it ever more slavish to the company's strange devotion to all things social within its silo. The world's largest ad broker said in a blog post yesterday that it had made yet more changes to the strip of buttons along the top of its pages, which was painted …
Met thumbed through Oyster card data up to 22,000 times in 4 years

Requests for info on passengers' movements up 15%

The Metropolitan police has requested Oyster card data relating to citizens and other personal information from Transport for London (TfL) more than 22,000 times since 2008, according to figures published by the capital's transport authority. The force requested personal data TfL holds relating to citizens 5,295 times in 2008 …
Oracle tucks R stats language into database

R-acle 11g, Quant Edition

Relational database juggernaut Oracle has embedded the R programming language used by more than 2 million statisticians and quants the world over into its 11g relational database. Call it R-acle 11g, Quant Edition. R, of course, is the open source statistical analysis programming language and is also the name of the runtime …
Oracle inhales Taleo for $1.9bn

Blows it onto the Fusion app cloud

Only two months ago, Taleo, the seller of online talent management software, was saying that it intended to remain independent despite the cloud software feeding frenzy. But today, Larry Ellison, CEO and co-founder of Oracle, made Taleo CEO Mike Gregoire an offer he couldn't refuse: $1.9bn. That price, net of cash and debts, …
Ofcom: Make it easier for punters to switch ISPs

But could middleman plan jack up prices?

Broadband and landline customers could soon find it a lot simpler to ditch one telco in favour of another, after Ofcom published its proposals on cutting the hassle out of switching providers for punters in the UK. The communications watchdog said today that research showed that 520,000 households in Blighty in the past year …
Indian ministers quit in parliament smut flick scandal

'It wasn't porn, it was a real-life rape' claims one

Three former ministers in the Indian state of Karnataka have until Monday to explain themselves to the Speaker of the local assembly after they were allegedly caught watching porn on a mobile phone during a debate in the House. The trio, accused of ogling the grumble flick in the state assembly building in tech town Bangalore …

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