Ohio's attorney general has announced that four more school staff, including a supervisor, have been indicted for interfering with the investigation of a teenager who was raped in Steubenville last year, attracting the attention of hackers from Anonymous.

SC13There's a lot of business-building freedom to be gained by escaping the tyranny of the Wall Street moneymen and turning your company into "the world's largest startup," a Dell exec tells The Reg.

Yahoo! staff are catching heat from bosses for largely eschewing the company's own email service in favor of competing software, according to a leaked memo.

A petition to save the doomed media player Winamp has already garnered more than 15,000 signatures, but the software's parent company has yet to show any signs of reversing its decision.

The day of action in support of Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN) has fizzled out, with just 20 people attending an event at the office of communications minister Malcolm Turnbull. Four of the twenty, including your correspondent, were media. One was a baby.

Australian embedded systems designer Redfish is hoping to attract funding from the crowd to market a secure routing platform that open-sources both the hardware and software to protect users from unwanted snooping.

A group of 60 or so US law professors have publicly backed an effort to overhaul the US patent system.

A new study has revealed that the amount of methane – a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent but far less prevalent than CO2 – released into the US atmosphere is significantly higher than previously thought.

Scientists from NIST and the University of Copenhagen have persuaded a handful of atoms to get into a tangle by shedding their heat into the outside world.

Qualcomm is the latest US technology giant to find itself in trouble in China, having been placed under investigation in an anti-monopoly probe and suffering from the fallout over NSA spying revelations.

Researchers in the USA and China are vying for the honour of being first off the block with a fibre-shaped supercapacitor built from carbon nanotubes.

Twitter has taken the odd step of enhancing its age verification routines so that alcohol vendors can “connect with an age-appropriate audience”.

A group of over 20 Japanese and US chip companies are joining forces to develop a way to mass produce new low power memory chips that operate ten times faster than DRAM.

Supermodel Lily Cole has launched a new social network, dubbed Impossible, that relies on the good nature of strangers to exchange "gifts" on the site for free.

XBOX One owners across Europe are grumpy with Microsoft, which seems to have shoved the new console out the door with settings that make British and European tellies “judder”.

Chinese phone maker ZTE has become the latest vendor to cuff itself to the smartwatch bandwagon after announcing plans to launch a device in the second quarter of 2014.

VidApplication developer and part-time security researcher Evan Booth has produced a series of videos showing how an array of apparently deadly weapons can be MacGyver'd from stuff on sale in airport shops.

IT's funnest guy, John McAfee, is making news again for things that have very little to do with technology.

A non-profit anti-censorship body has called on Eric Schmidt and Google to lead by example and call China’s bluff on web censorship with a simple two-pronged approach.

Sysadmin BlogMicrosoft is a company in transition. Speculation is rampant and everyone in the IT industry seems to have a strong opinion on what Microsoft should – and shouldn't – do.

StoragebodAs vendors race to be better, faster and to differentiate themselves in an already busy marketplace, the real needs of the storage teams can be left unmet - and also those of the storage consumer. At times it is as if the various vendors are building dragsters, calling them family saloons and hoping that nobody notices. The problems that I blogged about when I started out blogging seem still mostly unsolved.

Apple is working with a hearing aid manufacturer to produce a device using technology similar to that used in the much-derided bluetooth headset. The new kit will allow the hard-of-hearing to stream voice and music directly into the ear.

Benchmark software operation Futuremark has said it believes Samsung and HTC have attempted to rig the results its graphics testing app, 3DMark Android, yields when run on four of the two manufacturers’ most popular devices.

FeatureI need a new MacBook Pro… or do I? It’s probably a question that many a Mac user ponders and, given the choices these days, is much more difficult to answer. Having just reviewed the MacBook Pro 13in with Retina Display, I’m not sure I’m ready to commit myself to soldered RAM and the hope that upgrades will appear for its custom SSD form factor.

German chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile was wire-tapped by at least five foreign intelligence agencies, unnamed German security officials have told Focus magazine.

DataDirect Networks reckons existing parallel file systems will run full tilt into a scalability wall as they get overwhelmed by concurrent file accesses and locks from HPC compute complexes with tens of thousands of cores. A bigger, better and faster cache is needed.

Does the BBC still dislike Doctor Who the way it did back in the 1980s? Its presentation on iPlayer of this past Saturday’s 50th anniversary special, Day of the Doctor, suggests it might do. The 3D version is giving us headaches and eye-strain, allege eager Whovians.

Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang is taking a hand in the affairs of fast-growing Oracle and SAP competitor Workday.

LSI has produced a cost- and power draw-reduced server flash card product line for hyperscale data centres.

PicturesIn the high desert of Oregon, Facebook will store in a cold low-power digital morgue the photos of you, me, and everyone else on its content farm.

China's thirst for social networks will help the country's citizens smash through its rigid state control, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt has claimed.

KCom Group recorded a first-half year profit slide on the back of infrastructure and fibre optic investments with a downturn in business broadband and large enterprise integration work not helping.

Some lucky infosec professionals will be taking part in a cyber war game designed to test the readiness of NATO countries to respond to "large scale cyber attacks targeting information infrastructures" in the pretty city of Tartu in Estonia.

A Hong Kong rights group has accused supplier Biel Crystal of mistreating workers who are making touchscreens for Apple, Samsung and other smartphone makers.

A judge overseeing the interminable patent battle between Samsung and Apple has denied the South Korean firm's latest bid to stall proceedings.

OpinionThe IT community can be a wealth of information and support. There is always someone out there that has an opinion - good or bad - or a problem that is similar to yours.

NEIL hasn't slept or eaten in four months, it's just browsed the internet and tried to figure out connections between aircraft and aircraft carriers, or hot dogs and buns.

Online dating website Match.com is being sued by a woman in Florida, who has brought a $1.5bn class-action lawsuit against the company in which she alleges that photos of her and thousands of others were used without permission on fake profiles.

A company launched to defend Linux on PCs and servers is turning its attention to venture-backed cloud startups and mobile.

The cops have cuffed six people from Barton-upon-Humber and the surrounding area on suspicion of flogging counterfeit Microsoft gear online, the City of London (CoL) police has confirmed.

Google has begun to roll out version 4.4 of its Android KitKat software to Google Play editions of the Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One.

Many thousands of years ago, far away in the constellation Cassiopeia, a white dwarf star blew up with cataclysmic violence. Much, much later, in the year 1572 when good Queen Bess was on the throne, the light of the supernova reached Earth. Now, astronomers probing the vast cloud of slowly cooling gases left behind say they have made a remarkable series of discoveries.

If PC makers were despondent that slablets of every type continue to hog consumer spending this year, then 2014 will bring little relief - and may finally shove those teetering on the brink of the abyss over the edge.

HPC blogWe saw an interesting assortment of gear from the teams competing in the SC13 Standard (Big Iron) Track of the Student Cluster Competition.

ReviewHewlett-Packard’s first attempt at an Android tablet, the Slate 7, was a cheap, wretched and irredeemably awful device. So when I heard that the Palm killer’s follow-up fondleslab was to be a 21-inch affair, my reaction was one of incredulity mixed with foreboding.

Californian games PC maker iBuyPower has become one of the first vendors to take the wraps off an upcoming box based on Valve’s Steam OS.

Intel is reportedly asking for around $500m for the internet TV service it never quite managed to launch, OnCue.

The Cabinet Office has insisted the multi-billion pound software and hardware framework that is about to surface will complement and not overshadow its cloud-first policy.

Google is facing yet another privacy protest in Europe, after Mountain View recently tweaked its terms of service to allow it to plaster its users' profile names and photos over ads.

CEO interview blogCentralised storage often represents the performance bottleneck of the data centre stack. The storage array sits far away from the application and has to deal with changing I/O from multiple applications. As a result, latency to a busy storage array is high and performance can be unpredictable.

CIOs and IT bods are in the dark over tech budgets as lines of biz people sidestep them to deploy their own projects, according to a survey by the Corporate Executive Board.

The European Parliament has disabled its public Wi-Fi network following the detection of a suspected hacking attack which has been linked to the exposure of weak security practices at the institution by a French media outlet.

A new Russian Progress cargoship, loaded up with nearly three tonnes of food, fuel, supplies and holiday gifts for the International Space Station's crew launched from Baikonur last night.

A team of archeologists have dug up the oldest Buddhist shrine in the world, literally shedding light on the birthplace of Buddha.

Microsoft has announced that it will silence swearing and cursing players on its Xbox Live online gaming service.

Motorola has offered an early Christmas present to its US customers by making its new, low-cost Moto G handset available for preorder in time for the holidays.

On November 28, while many Americans will be sitting down to roast turkey and all the trimmings, Comet ISON faces being slowly cooked to death as it passes within a million miles of the Sun's surface.

Microsoft is offering a free game download to players whose new Xbox One consoles suffering from broken disc drives.

The Vulture South team has just driven from Darwin to Adelaide to cover the World Solar Challenge, the biennial car race that aims to accelerate the development of solar technology.

Containerization tech Docker is now supported by all the major Linux distros, making it easier for developers to adopt the lightweight app packaging and shipping tool.

The infamous “Aussie Tax” might be getting squeezed in the IT industry, but it's alive and well in other tech markets.

While copies of the latest version of Grand Theft Auto V are flying off the shelves, Rockstar isn’t sitting on its laurels. It's announced it will bring the much-loved San Andreas 2004 version to phones and fondleslabs.

The Australian Digital Alliance (ADA) has joined its voice to those warning that the Trans Pacific Partnership treaty negotiations are heading into dangerous waters. The treaty text is such a mess, the ADA warns, that the IP provisions should simply be ditched.

The near unthinkable has happened. Despite a troubled year for the PC industry and a generally poor outlook for the next one, HP has managed to report good news for its fourth quarter, beating expectations both for the quarter and for fiscal 2013.