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Fancy method captures three-dimensional images of biomolecules The 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to a trio of researchers that have developed a new technique that captures three dimensional images of biological molecules.…

Bengali speakers freed from absence of search monetisation Google has learned to speak Bengali and found an extra 200 million people to advertise to along the way.…

Farmers can keep it, but cities' spectrum scarcity needs a fix Intelsat and Intel reckon there's a chunk of spectrum currently devoted to satellite operations that could be useful for capacity-starved mobile comms.…

Federal Police won't need to wait a week any more to see you smile Updated Australia is to build a national database of as many citizens' images as it can, with state premiers rubber-stamping prime minister Malcolm Turnbull's plan to add drivers' licenses to a national facial recognition database.…

Even Extended Support Releases will be naked and alone as of June 2018 Mozilla has announced it will end support for its Firefox browser on Windows XP and Windows Vista.…

Google unwraps toy image rec neural net Google today popped online something called Teachable Machines, a simple demo for programmers interested in deep learning.…

New attack flips bits in uerspace binaries for fun and p0wnage Ever since Rowhammer first emerged, there's been something of an arms race between researchers and defenders, and the boffins firing the latest shot reckon they've beaten all available protections.…

And a slightly creepy but well-intentioned robo-camera Google today showed off some new Android phones, a laptop, two Home assistants, and a genuine surprise: a set of earbuds that attempt to emulate Douglas Adams’ legendary Babel Fish – a real-time language translator.…

And don't forget to add in those backdoors, ta The second-in-command at the US Department of Justice says every business should have its own program to let third-party researchers find and report bugs.…

You can't come in... oh, $20? Right this way, Vlad Analysis Social media giants Twitter and Facebook remain at the end of severe criticism from US Congress and elsewhere as investigations into Russia's interference in America's presidential elections highlight the depth to which the tech giants' platforms continue to be abused.…

Storage software updated and benchmark spanked NetApp has updated its SolidFire Element OS, StorageGRID Webscale, ONTAP, and OnCommand Insight software. These packages, which sit under its Data Fabric umbrella brand, are supposed to unify and manage storage across on-premises kit and public cloud stores.…

Parisian e-learning outfit launches in US Special report An online college focused on the tech industry is promising to find you a job in six months or it will refund your course fees in full.…

Foes flustered by 'dangerous' light-touch regulation America-wide rules for self-driving cars inched a bit closer on Wednesday when a US Senate transportation committee agreed to bring the AV START Act before the full Senate for consideration.…

Mystery of disappearing photos solved, too Apple has pushed out a software update to address the handful of bugs that were nagging its latest iPhone models and flavor of iOS.…

Azure Functions upgraded to woo developers speaking Oracle's language JavaOne Microsoft has announced Java support for Azure Functions, the serverless cloud platform which competes with AWS Lambda. The announcement was made at the JavaOne event under way in San Francisco this week.…

38-year-old said to be appealing Greek court's decision A Greek court has approved the US extradition of a Russian national accused of running a $4bn Bitcoin laundering ring on the now-defunct BTC-e exchange.…

Managing the legacy and you “Legacy” is a word that we tend to associate with big companies. After all, they’re the ones who have vast piles of equipment that go out of date in no time at all but require big money and big projects to replace them with modern stuff.…

And it's all Microsoft's fault 'cos 'we aren't an OS company' – PC giant Canalys Channels Forum HP Inc has finally confirmed it is to kill off X3 device sales and support by the end of 2019, cutting short the proposed roadmap and hanging the blame on Microsoft's "change of strategy" with its mobile OS.…

Or so say a bunch of PC execs and Canalys CEO Canalys Channels Forum Microsoft will quit its loss-making Surface hardware business by 2019, according to execs from PC manufacturers and a channel watcher.…

EU competition commish cracks whip twice in a day The European Commission has ordered Amazon to repay €250m (£222m) for benefiting from illegal and unfair state aid courtesy of Luxembourg.…

Asteroid smacks chunks off a volcano... but not as we know it New research adds extra support for where exactly six meteorites that travelled from Mars to Earth millions of years ago, called "nakhlites", may have originated.…

Better late than never, I guess Google's controversial DeepMind has created an ethics unit to "explore and understand" the real-world impacts of AI.…

A pox on your proxy, seethe Excel-wranglers Microsoft's general one-stop URL for Office news and updates, blogs.office.com, is dead for some IP addresses in Europe and elsewhere in the world.…

This is not just a hut. This is an original Bletchley Park hut Block H has been declared one of England's "irreplaceable places", the National Museum of Computing has joyously announced.…

Decision 'extremely regrettable', says Irish government The European Commission has referred Ireland to the Court of Justice over its failure to recover illegal tax benefits from Apple worth up to €13bn (£11.5bn).…

I'm sorry, I didn't understand the question NetApp has reinvented Clippy with a Watson-powered chatbot called Elio, and is taking a leaf out of Nimble's book by using automated and predictive/proactive support called Active IQ.…

(Nearly) everything you wanted to know about machine learning and AI Whether you're wondering how to cope as your competitors embrace machine learning or are itching to embed AI into your company's DNA, you'd be doing yourselves a big favour by joining us at MCubed London next week.…

Early signs might be positive, but this is holy ground for some 1982 was a good year for sci-fi cinema. ET, Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan, Tron, The Thing. All great in their own ways. It was also the year Blade Runner came out.…

Hyper-V-focused HCIA products pushed out by cloud services takeover +Comment A raft of sales execs, marketeers, architects and two co-founders have exited HyperGrid, the hyperconverged infrastructure appliance (HCIA) startup formerly known as GridStore, over the past nine months.…

Show you're not n00b with these slick analytical skillz Hello, wrong number Analytical skills are in big demand so it is really important not to make the basic, common, mistakes that show you up as a newbie.…

Just 53 per cent of the image made it home, so software thought it couldn't be a photo The European Space Agency (ESA) has been able to squeeze one last photo out of the Rosetta probe.…

Transtelecom can reach 256 North Korean hosts North Korea's very limited Internet has, for the second time in its brief history, obtained a redundant connection to the outside world.…

Larry E wants diverse log file formats tamed, so you can ask security questions in natural language OpenWorld 2017 Oracle’s founder and chief technology officer Larry Ellison put on his best salesman act Tuesday during his second keynote at the tech giant's OpenWorld gabfest – this time playing up the impact high-profile IT security breaches have had on organisations and increasing concerns over state hackers.…

Someone failed to order the patch. If it was you, c'mere, have a hug. And a new identity Recently-and-forcibly-retired Equifax CEO Rick Smith has laid the blame for his credit-check biz's IT security breach on a single member of the company's security team.…

It's an international tug-of-war: Russia also wants to extradite Peter Levashov The 36-year-old Russian accused of herding pump-and-dump spambots will be tried in America, following a decision of a Spanish court.…

Gadgets that need Flash now have another alternative OS Version 10.4 of FreeBSD has landed, with the headline feature being support for eMMC.…

'Pairing colours, type and imagery' is the new creativity, apparently LOGOWATCH LogoWatch's formative computing experiences included using multiple fonts – nearly always Kawasaki and Chicago – sometimes with different shadings, in Aldus PageMaker on early Macs' nine-inch screens.…

At last, the leadership America desperately needs If you've never heard of Stonecrest, Georgia, you're not alone: the town on the outer fringes of Atlanta only voted itself into existence a couple of years ago. But it's now put itself on the map by offering to rename 345 acres of land “Amazon” in a bid to land Amazon.com's new headquarters.…

Wee small hours civil defence wake-in-fright text arrives on Vodafone mobes A time-zone mixup has resulted in about half of all New Zealanders being woken by civil defence and emergency management authorities sending a test text message overnight.…

We meant it, nothing matters any more. Nothing at all White House cybersecurity coordinator Rob Joyce has won the backing of Equifax's ex-CEO for a plan to stop using social security numbers as personal identifiers in the US.…

Cloud Firestore aspires to scale better Google's twin fetish manifested itself in its Firebase platform-as-a-service offering on Tuesday through the introduction of a second realtime NoSQL database.…

El Reg takes another spin on Redmond's VR headset support in Fall Creators release With the release of the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update just two weeks away, Microsoft showcased on Tuesday more of the virtual-reality headset support that will be bundled with the software upgrade.…

They're just trolling us at this point Shortly after we all learned of a massive security breach at Equifax in which the personal information of 143 million 145.5 million Americans and sundry Brits and Canadians was plundered by hackers, the US Internal Revenue Service awarded Equifax a no-bid contract – to provide identity verification services for the tax authority.…

Drivers' licenses pics shared with States? You ain't seen nothing yet: the private sector might get your mugshot, too Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has hinted that the expansion of the nation's facial recognition databases could include private sector access.…

Every user pwned, how's that $4bn looking now, Verizon? With Equifax testifying in US Congress today about its own massive security failings, someone at Yahoo! presumably thought now would be a good time to bury bad news – but some things are too large to hide.…

Unless of course your site is so dull that a little hacker defacement will cheer it up The plugin gurus at WordFence have this week found three critical security holes in third-party WordPress extensions that are being actively exploited by hackers to take over websites.…

For perhaps the first time ever, a JavaOne keynote was actually useful Analysis In the wake of a safe harbor disclaimer insisting Oracle could not be held to anything said during its JavaOne conference keynote on Monday, Georges Saab, veep of software development for the Java platform, talked his way through a Java victory lap.…

Engineering the Microsoft way Microsoft has explained how a cascading series of cockups left some of its Northern European Azure customers without access to services for nearly seven hours.…

Krzanich pays tribute to former Chipzilla supremo Former Intel CEO Paul Otellini died on Monday aged 66, the chip maker confirmed this morning.…

NFS as a service on-ramp to Azure NetApp is making NFS available as a service in Microsoft's Azure Cloud, enaabling on-premises NFS-using applications to move into Azure.…