Massachusetts cops have admitted paying a ransom to get their data back on an official police computer infected with the devilish Cryptolocker ransomware.

Samsung has launched a pair of last-ditch efforts to thwart its ongoing technology patent infringement legal battle with Apple.

The hoop-snake world of patent trolling just took another bite on its own tail, with Microsoft suing Acacia Research over licenses Microsoft licensed from Acacia Research, but which Acacia Research has declined to license to Microsoft.

Cisco has implemented a reverse mentoring program that sees its younger and less-experienced staff advise its managers, the better to help the latter develop strategy.

While the media industry is convinced 4K televisions are the next big thing, Qualcomm claims its new Snapdragon 805 processor will bring 4,000 pixel content to smartphones.

Microsoft Research has released something cute: a Windows Phone app that acts as a “remote control” for Office 2013.

Heterogeneous networks – hetnets, or WiFi offloading – are all the rage among carriers and equipment vendors, but it generally assumes the WiFi access point has a wired connection.

The exotic laptop lads at Eurocom have just unleashed another in their series of very peculiar contraptions: the Panther 5SE laptop.

Serious water-cooled gamer-rig types will probably get busy experimenting with iron filings, water and magnets, to see if they can maker-reproduce research that uses magnets to create what amounts to a switch-on, switch-off heatsink.

Qatar has unexpectedly delighted international pundits by unveiling the design for its 2022 World Cup Al Wakrah stadium, whose roof is designed to represent "the sails of the Arabian pearl fishing boat the Dhow", but actually bearing more than a passing resemblance to a woman's nether regions.

Look out Skype; China Mobile has launched a new VoIP service in a bid to snag international users making or receiving calls from the People’s Republic.

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt has been shooting his mouth of again – this time predicting the end of global internet censorship within a decade.

In November 2014, leaders of the G20 group of nations will convene in Brisbane, Australia, for a few days of plotting to form a one-world government high-level talks aimed at ensuring global stability and amity.

Justice minister Lord McNally has told the House of Lords that the new Defamation Act, which received Royal Assent in April, will take effect from the start of next year.

A fangurl has launched a class action suit on behalf of everyone who had thought the iPhone was an unfailingly accurate navigational tool and was accordingly disappointed with the quality of Apple's iOS Maps app.

Russian-speaking virus writers have brewed up a stealthy strain of banking Trojan that communicates over peer-to-peer networks using an encrypted darknet protocol that's arguably even stealthier than TOR: I2P.

ReviewLast year’s iPad Mini really was playing second fiddle to the regular iPad. Not merely smaller than its sibling, the Mini had a much lower resolution display. It had a less powerful processor too. It felt like a product Apple was obliged to make rather than one it actually wanted to.

FeatureWhat did you want to be when you grew up? Chances are as a follower of Dr Who, you wanted to be a Time lord.

AnalysisNewly published research has shined new light on super-malware Stuxnet's older sibling – which was also designed to wreck Iran's nuclear facilities albeit in a different way.

You don‘t know the POWER of the Dark Side Register.

Santa's sack may be bulging this Chrimbo but it'll be slabs rather than smartwatches weighing the old boy down.

DataDirect Networks has boosted its already big, mean and fast SFA12K big data/HPC storage arrays to go faster still with the SFA12KX product, running at up to 48GB/sec from a single appliance.

FeatureFollowing last month’s announcement of a £1m nationwide spam drop, what now for care.data, the NHS's latest multi-million pound big data project?

ReviewSo we’re all Dom Joly now - shouting into gigantically oversized phones. Well, not everybody - but large devices have seen amazing sales increase in the 18 months, catapulting them out of the techie niche they’ve quietly inhabited for years.

Boffins have dated a piece of Martian meteorite they reckon is the oldest bit of the planet ever collected.

SC13The biannual Green500 list of the most energy-efficient supercomputers has broken new ground in two important ways: for the first time an HPC system broke the 4 gigaflops per watt barrier, and also for the first time all the top 10 systems benefitted from GPU acceleration. Then there's a third bit of note: the benchmarks are rubbish.

The next Star Wars movie will see the return of droid favourite R2-D2, who will be built for the film by two Brit fans who are in a Star Wars robot-building club.

Shoppers at the American department store Macy's are set to be the first to be tracked by Apple's controversial new iSpy system.

Facebook’s Open Compute Project has found little overt support in Europe to date, the firm’s data centre boss said today, in part because of those crazy continentals’ obsession with carbon neutrality over efficiency.

A restructure at Capita IT Services is long overdue - well it has been eight whole months since the last one - so the healing mitts of MD Peter Hands have once again grasped the org chart for a rejig.

It is a momentus day for ailing PC maker Acer: founder and former CEO Stan Shih has agreed to exit retirement, albeit temporarily, to try to dig the business out of a deepening hole.

Doctor Who @ 50The Doctor’s many visits to Earth have seen him not only venture around the globe but also far above and below its surface.

If you're bothered by the various ways Google uses the data you submit to its services to serve you targeted ads, then Microsoft has the T-shirt for you. Or a coffee mug, perhaps. You know – stuff that totally isn't ads.

Two private investigators who tricked organisations into revealing personal details about customers have been found guilty of breaching the Data Protection Act.

Bill Gates has carried out the bloody murder of his former friend and colleague Steve Ballmer.

Doctor Who @ 50Today, the world of 1963 seems extraordinarily remote - and narrow. The “Beatles” name was still a jarring pun, and Telstar live transatlantic TV was just a little over a year old. I remember seeing JFK via Telstar when it kicked off, and then again that November in Dallas in 1963. There were no supermarkets, no plastic bags, and nobody calling social services when this eight-year-old was sent to pick up 20 Kensitas for his mother from the grocer across the street.

Ad kingpin Google is flashing its talons in Kampala, Uganda, where it has built - in its own words - "a super-fast, high-capacity fibre network to enable any local mobile operator or ISP to connect more people" in the African city.

Intel said it was working on stacking a layer of memory on its Xeon processors to run memory-bound workloads faster.

To some, Rob Bearden is a hero. In just a few years, the venture capitalist flipped two open-source startups, turning diamonds in the rough into gems in the corporate M&A crown.

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is talking up the potential of a looming overhaul of the nation's telephony service.

DNA from a prehistoric Siberian boy could reveal exactly where Native Americans - the people who occupied the American continents before Europeans crossed the Atlantic - actually came from.

The US House of Representatives' Judiciary Committee has voted 33-5 to send a bill to the full House that aims to stop abusive patent lawsuits and so-called patent trolls.

Kaminario has taken the SPC-2 streaming storage benchmark, shook it hard, wrung it out, and left everyone else for dust with its K2 all-flash array, with a result nearly twice as fast as the previously top-ranked Oracle ZFS array.

The Microsoft Xbox One team has drawn up a draft sick note for layabouts hoping to take Friday off work to play with their new games consoles.

NASA has halted its rover Curiosity on Mars for a few days while engineers on Earth attempt to figure out what caused an electrical fault in the robot.

Miscreants have fired up a large army of remote-controlled computers to get around GitHub's login rate-limiting policies, designed to thwart attempts to brute-force guess the passwords for its users' accounts.

London's Leicester Square has been rebranded as "Xbox One Square" ahead of the release of Microsoft's next generation games console.

Chromecast users have another string to their media bow with the addition of HBO Go to the list of media companies streaming content through Google's cheap and cheerful dongle.

Facebook has developed an open-source database library that wrings more performance out of server-side flash storage than ever before, while building on previous technology published by Google.

PicsForget self-driving cars. How about flying ones? Reports have emerged of what appears to be a mysterious airborne vehicle being developed by a stealth company operating near Google's Mountain View headquarters.

Intel is reporting that server boards and connectors in India and China are suffering from corrosion due to the high levels of smog.

Earth has been bathed in its largest recorded burst of gamma rays after a star in the constellation Leo, 3.7 billion light-years away, collapsed in on itself to form a black hole.

Scientists at the South Pole have detected a collection of warp speed neutrinos from deep space that could help explain the origins of the universe.

SC13 – UpdatedThe current top-end Ethernet standard may be 100 gigabits per second, but don't expect the next step up to be one terabit per second. The days of Ethernet speeds improving by an order of magnitude are gone. Why? Because nobody wants to pay for the necessary research and development – nobody in the US or the EU, that is.

Cisco has extended access to its facilities and software upgrades to customers of its soon-to-be-ex "Gold Partner" Phoenix IT Group, which had also provided maintenance services.

UpdatedLast time Microsoft's Azure cloud went down, it was a sub-component that flaked out globally, and the time before that it was a certificate problem – now the service is inaccessible again, along with its status page.

After three days of deliberation, the jury in Apple's patent fight with Samsung has determined that the South Korean chaebol will have to pay Cupertino $290m in damages and lost profits after pinching its designs.