Iain Thomson

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 – …

CommentThursday's failed Soyuz launch, carrying kit and astronauts to the International Space Station means NASA is fast running out of options for shipping stuff into orbit. Especially since its homespun solutions aren't living up to their earlier promise. The US space agency hasn't been wild about using the Russians as a delivery …

IBM has officially griped to a top US government watchdog about JEDI – the Pentagon's proposed 10-year $10bn single-vendor IT system for America’s Green Machine. Whichever lucky lone supplier wins the coveted Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract will be responsible for providing all cloud activities for the …

The big data market became a little less competitive on Wednesday when two of the biggest players, Cloudera and Hortonworks, agreed to merge. “Our businesses are highly complementary and strategic,” said Tom Reilly, chief executive officer at Cloudera. “By bringing together Hortonworks’ investments in end-to-end data …

It’s that time of year again: CRM loyalists flood San Francisco for the annual Dreamforce conference hosted by Salesforce – but day one hasn’t exactly gone to plan. For a start, on Tuesday, protestors wheeled a huge wooden cage down the street outside the busy conference center to rally against Salesforce signing a multi- …

A Romanian woman has admitted running a ransomware operation from infected Washington DC's CCTV systems just days before President Trump was sworn into office in the US capital. Eveline Cismaru, 28, pled guilty this week to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and one count of conspiracy to commit computer fraud, …

Cops have named the programmer who went on a gun rampage at WTS Paradigm – a US maker of enterprise resource planning software – this week. He shot four colleagues, leaving one in a critical condition. At around 10.20am on Wednesday, Anthony Tong, 45, who had worked at the company in Middleton, Wisconsin, for little over a …

The three brains behind the Mirai malware, which infects and pressgangs Internet-of-Things devices into a botnet army, have avoided jail. In December, Paras Jha, 22, Josiah White, 21, and Dalton Norman, 22, pleaded guilty in the US to breaking the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act after developing and masterminding the Mirai …

VideoSpaceX today named its first paying passenger it will fly around the Moon and back to Earth – and it's Japanese biz baron Yusaku Maezawa. Yeah, him. You know. Him. “SpaceX has signed the world’s first private passenger to fly around the Moon aboard our BFR launch vehicle — an important step toward enabling access for everyday …