Iain Thomson

The group trying to crowdfund a plan to colonization of Mars that was declared suicidal has shuttered its shop front. The Mars One project envisaged landing on Mars by 2023: it hoped to shuttle cargo over to the dust world first, followed by members of the public who had submitted successful applications for the one-way trip. …

RoundupHere's a summary of more infosec news beyond what we've already reported this week – enjoy. Beware of pretend Italian plumbers bearing gifts: Mario, the beloved video game plumber with a porn-star mustache, should be treated with caution, according to security shop Bromium. Well, at least images of him. Engineer Matthew Rowen …

National Enquirer publisher American Media Inc (AMI) today denied it blackmailed Amazon head honcho Jeff Bezos by threatening to leak his nude selfies if he didn't play ball. Bezos caused a major stir on Thursday after he published online emails that appeared to show AMI executives threatening to print highly embarrassing …

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos today published an extraordinary open letter claiming National Enquirer publisher American Media Inc (AMI) is trying to blackmail him by threatening to leak purloined pics of the billionaire's "semi-erect manhood." In effect, the zillionaire tech baron has shot back, publicly revealing descriptions of his …

Wells Fargo customers have been unable to access their online bank accounts for more than seven hours today – after smoke knackered one of its data centers. Starting around 6am Pacific Time (2pm UTC), the American bank's online portal and its mobile application have been totally unusable. There are also reports of cards being …

Despite revealing licensing and chip sales fell by 20 per cent in its latest quarter, shares in Qualcomm managed to hold steady in after-hours trading on Wednesday. They were up a tad over two per cent to $51.40 apiece following a bold outlook for the year. "We are pleased to announce a good first quarter, particularly in the …

It has long been known that our Milky Way is on a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy, with the epic prang to take place in four to eight billion years' time. New data suggests we'll hit another galaxy well before that, though, and the super-smash could send our Solar System headfirst on a path out of the Milky Way. Our …

China's Chang'e 4 spacecraft has touched down on the Moon, state media reports, making it the first-ever probe to set down on the far side of Earth's natural satellite. The spacecraft, which blasted off into the heavens on December 7, was in an elliptical orbit around the Moon, swinging within 15 kilometres (nine miles) of the …

On December 10, 1993, after a marathon 30-hour coding session, the developers at id Software uploaded the first finished copy of Doom for download, the game that was to redefine first-person shooter (FPS) genre. Hours later IT admins wanted id's guts for garters. Doom wasn't the first FPS game, but it was the iPhone of the …

NASA's mission to send a probe to an asteroid, dig up a chunk, and send the material back to Earth is now half-way complete. The agency says its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has reached its hunk-of-rock target after a trip lasting two years and two billion miles. The spacecraft, technically the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, …

The CEO of AriseBank, a Texas-based upstart that billed itself as the world’s “first decentralized banking platform,” has been arrested by the FBI and charged with securities and wire fraud. Last summer, Jared Rice, Sr claimed his newly found biz would provide everyday bank accounts to customers to store their cryptocurrencies …

ObitBill Godbout, a maverick techie who played a pivotal role in getting computers into the hands of the masses, was killed this week in California's wildfires. He was aged 79. Godbout was a key figure in the personal computing revolution in the 1970s, at least in the US. Around the time Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were dumpster …

The 1809 build of Windows 10 and Windows Server is fast becoming infamous. Microsoft pulled it shortly after release when it started deleting people's files, and stumbling in other ways. Redmond reissued the software on Tuesday, and today it's clear you shouldn't rush into deploying it, if installing it at all, in its present …

Parents could be unwittingly putting their children's safety and privacy at risk, thanks to security vulnerabilities in potentially millions of kids' GPS-tracker watches. These cheapo watches are supposed to be worn by the youngsters, and use SIM cards to connect to cellular networks. The idea is they beam to backend servers …

A planet three times the size of Earth has been spotted orbiting Barnard's Star, one of the closest suns to our Solar System. Various science-fiction authors – notably Douglas Adams, Arthur C. Clarke and Michael Moorcock – have written about an alien world around Barnard's Star, which at six light years away is relatively …

Chinese phone maker Xiaomi is in damage-control mode after an online promotion coinciding with its big UK launch somewhat backfired. The plan was to offer handsets for just a quid in Blighty, when a countdown on its UK website reached zero, with the impression being that if you clicked soon after the timer ran out, you'd be …

AnalysisThis week the US Copyright Office ruled it's OK for Americans to break anti-piracy protections in a bunch of home and personal devices, and vehicles, in the course of fixing or tinkering with said equipment. Mechanisms put in place to thwart unauthorized repairs or changes – such as firmware code that disables third-party …

The US Copyright Office has ruled that, in certain circumstances, folks can legally break a manufacturer's anti-piracy mechanisms – aka digital rights management (DRM) – if they want to repair their own gear. The ruling, issued Thursday, states that from this Sunday onwards "the prohibition against circumvention of …

The family of the late Professor Stephen Hawking is auctioning off some of his possessions – including an early version of his motorized wheelchair – to raise money for the charitable foundation that bears his name. In all, 22 items from the Hawk will be up for grabs. These include a red leather-clad motorized wheelchair the …

Googlers must clean up their language at work as the ads giant is being anal about references to, ahem, carnal knowledge in internal web links and documents. Files and URLs with raunchy words like "fuck" in them are now forbidden from being shared around the workplace, and are already being automatically filtered out to …

An Equifax executive – who knew the biz had been hacked before it was made public and banked over $75,000 in stock trades using this inside knowledge – has avoided jail. Sudhakar Reddy Bonthu, formerly a software product development manager for Equifax’s Global Consumer Services team, admitted to learning that hackers have …

VideoA Chinese businessman has announced plans to light Chengdu at night by launching an artificial "moon" to direct the out-of-sight Sun's rays down onto the city's streets. The idea is the brainchild of Wu Chunfeng, chairman of Chengdu Aerospace Science and Technology Microelectronics System Research Institute. He said …

A programmer who wrote and sold software that backdoored PCs so they could be remotely controlled has been jailed for 30 months – and forced to give up his stash of 114 Bitcoins. Colton Grubbs, 21, of Stanford, Kentucky, was sentenced this week after admitting to creating LuminosityLink, a software package he claimed was a …

As any San Francisco Bay Area resident knows traffic is bad and getting worse, but the city's officials think they have found the culprit: ride-hailing companies. In a report [PDF] issued on Tuesday the San Francisco County Transportation Authority acknowledged that a lot of new people have moved into the area, drawn by tech …

October is shaping up to be a lousy month for NASA. First, the Hubble space telescope went into hibernation. Then a Russian Soyuz rocket failed to get its astronauts and kit up to the orbiting International Space Station. And now the American agency's Chandra X-ray Observatory, tens of thousands of miles from Earth, is kaput – …