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Yet interweb access is still crap for two thirds, says Which? Broadband is more essential than owning a mobile phone, running a car or having savings, according to a survey by consumer watchdog organisation Which?…

An Android smartie with just one funny story Hands-on Last year, Huawei built a phone for Google called the Nexus 6P, and everyone who had one loved it. Huawei's "nova" (officially lowercase) resembles a slimline version of the Nexus 6P. But while it retains the quite beautiful design, the Nova is not a Nexus 6P at all.…

Apply best routing practices liberally. Repeat each morning Solve the DDoS problem? No problem. We’ll just get ISPs to rewrite the internet. In this interview Ian Levy, technical director of GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre, says it’s up to ISPs to rewrite internet standards and stamp out DDoS attacks coming from the UK. In particular, they should change the Border Gateway Protocol, which lies at the heart of the routing system, he suggests.…

Astride both sides of data centre startup line Sysadmin Blog I have met the enemy, and he is me. I stand astride a line. On one side I am an "IT decision-maker", on the other an "evangelist" for some startups I truly believe in. This year, I have learned a lot more about how the data centre sausage is truly made.…

Won't someone think of the children, literally? The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the European Consumer Organization (BEUC) are calling for US and EU data protection authorities to take action against insecure networked toys.…

Broad smiles, good suits and fake IDs test security in new dimensions FEATURE "Go to this McDonald's," Chris Gatford told me. "There's a 'Create Your Taste' burger-builder PC there and you should be able to access the OS. Find that machine, open the command prompt and pretend to do something important.…

Hello [celebrity], please reset your password Bahamas man Alonzo Knowles has been sentenced to five years jail for hacking the email accounts of celebrities to steal and sell unreleased television and movie scripts, music, financial documents, and pornographic self footage.…

Who the hell needs zero days? A Flash vulnerability subject to emergency patching by Adobe has been used in all major exploit kits to compromise users not already updated.…

Situation goes from terrible to surreal The president of the European Patent Office has responded to a formal rebuke of efforts to impose his will on the organization by asking for more power.…

Same group compromised a million users A DAY. A two-year long, highly sophisticated malvertising campaign infected visitors to some of the most popular news sites in the UK, Australia, and Canada including Channel 9, Sky News, and MSN.…

Don't put your VMs in a spook-controlled cloud A couple of German boffins have taken a good look at AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV), and don't like what they see.…

Falcon's return to space delayed until January SpaceX has delayed its planned December launch until January 2017.…

Good news for embedded virtualisers, Debian users and anyone who likes stability A new version of the Xen Project's hypervisor has emerged blinking into the light.…

Are you reading this, Brian? First, it fired shots at Intel's data center margins. Now Qualcomm is gunning for its rival's notebook processor cash cow.…

Dr Matt Green to comb the code Johns Hopkins University crypto professor Dr Matthew Green is to lead a security audit of OpenVPN 2.4.…

Cheap US power costs a quarter of Japanese electricity Case study Yahoo! Japan has teamed up with DDN Storage and IBM Japan to help it avoid the country's relatively high electricity costs – and run a disaster-recovery backup site on another continent for an earthquake rocks the nation.…

Plans for version 3.0 canned as Distributed Management Task Force says the job's done Work has ended on the Open Virtualisation Format (OVF), the Distributed Management Task Force's (DMTF's) packaging format for virtual machines.…

Kit dumped after fears over battery life and durability The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) says it will not be equipping its officers with body cameras after the units were found to be not rugged enough for field use.…

It's been two years and no patches, say researchers Vid Amid ongoing malware infections of IoT gadgets and armies of commandeered gizmos attacking server, glaring security holes in web-connected CCTV cameras are going unpatched.…

'Here's your new password, champ – GoF*!#Urs3lf' Facebook is hiring an Offensive Security Engineer, and not the sort inclined to disparage the length of your keys or your choice of encryption algorithm.…

The good, the bad, and the Ctl-C, Ctl-V A couple of days after being warned it was dragging its feet on open government strategies, the Federal Government has released its Open Government National Action Plan.…

That's not the SSL you're thinking of SSL (previously Space Systems/Loral) has won a contract to build a robot capable of refueling satellites in orbit, whether or not they have been designed to get more fuel.…

Meanwhile, another nasty Linux bug surfaces Google has posted an update for Android that, among other fixes, officially closes the Dirty COW vulnerability.…

Smartwatch market down by one Smartwatch maker Fitbit has confirmed it has bought competitor Pebble – for an undisclosed sum – but only its software. Pebble products are on the scrapheap.…

So says Imperva after trolling the dark web Prefab phishing campaigns cost less to run and are twice as profitable as traditional phishing attacks, according to a new study by security vendor Imperva.…

We must have misheard... Plus - a Windows 10 Xmas

A nice little 'underperformer', apparently Accounting and payroll firm Sage may offload part of its North American business.…

Delayed transaction of US-HQ'd Ingram Micro gets regulatory approval The world's largest tech distributor is now privately owned by the Chinese: shipping titan Tianjin Tianhai has coughed a whopping $6bn to take over US-based Ingram Micro.…

Tech's Mystic Megs also say robotics market will expand. No shit, Sherlock Those crazy tech shamans at IDC have been sniffing the data centre cooling system exhausts again, this time breathlessly informing us that in three years "30 per cent of commercial service robotic applications" will take the form of "robot as a service". We have no idea either.…

'DNA' evidence used to track suspect on trial this week A Danish man being tried for arson offences might have not have been nabbed by cops if he hadn’t stopped for a five-knuckle shuffle in public, a police spokesman told a local TV crew.…

... after Moto gives the wrist a rest Apple typically leaves the phone ringing when reporters call, so an instant rebuttal from the CEO is almost newsworthy in itself. Yesterday Tim Cook broke his monastic silence to respond to a report that Apple Watch sales were in a funk.…

Interesting response to 'lack of clarity' on details moan The UK government has insisted it is effectively communicating the benefits of its controversial smart meter programme – despite MPs having identified a "lack of clarity" over the "problem" the scheme is trying to solve.…

Centriq 2400 now sampling, due to beat Chipzilla by a year Qualcomm says it has started shipping to customers samples of the Centriq 2400, its 10nm 64-bit ARMv8-A general-purpose server-grade system-on-chip.…

More prominent evidence needed to back up claims of 75% faster speeds than rivals Mobile provider EE has had to remove a number of TV, homepage and press ads for advertising "misleading" 4G speeds.…

Resistance is futile The Circle, Dave Eggers' novel about a society dominated by an omniscient, cult-like Silicon Valley internet company, has been given the big-screen treatment, with the trailer emerging this week. The movie's promo site has a witty parody of the "onboarding" process for a web platform – enjoy the unreadable EULA as it flashes past, and all your privacy and personal data is slurped up.…

And maybe over-analysed too HPC Blog It's time to close the books on another highly successful SC Student Cluster Competition. This year was special in a number of ways. First, it was the event's 10th anniversary. At 14 teams, it was also the largest SC competition ever – a far cry from the original five. SC16 was also noteworthy in terms of the performance achieved (more than twice the existing LINPACK record) and the wide variety of cluster configurations designed by the student participants.…

Venerable aircraft carrier makes her final journey Venerable aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious leaves Britain today on her final journey to a Turkish scrapyard, despite efforts to preserve her for the nation as a museum ship.…

Comrades: We present your official alternative to Android Comment The quest for freedom from US technologies and patent fees has been a persistent theme in China and has helped shape the new mobile landscape, in which Baidu and Alibaba, not Google and Amazon, dominate the user experience. Less is heard about another massive market, Russia, but here too, the push for technology self-sufficiency is gathering momentum, creating opportunities for alternatives to Android and iOS.…

The internet of me Sysadmin blog For one brief instant, Microsoft was the good guy. Deep within the often customer-hostile behemoth, left after the arrogance and straight on past the victim blaming is the office of Brian First, with the Microsoft Experience Design Group. Alongside a company called Event Presence, Brian made me feel like a real person, actual and whole.…

Vendors caught between risks and fear of missing out on growth markets Feature China and Russia are populous, wealthy nations that the technology industry has long-regarded as exceptional growth prospects.…

Have you tried not turning it off and on again? Epson Wi-Fi-connected printers are repeatedly crashing due to what looks like a combination of a firmware update gone wrong and Google Cloud Print.…

When vendors tell you what to whitelist, crims are reading too Advanced malware writers are using anti-virus exclusion lists to better target victims, researchers say.…

Browser vendors' Battery API deprecation can't come soon enough Browser authors are abandoning the invasive Battery API W3C specification, but not everybody's got the memo: Uber, for example, still watches battery status.…

Network lifter-and-shifter automates cloud migrations The vendor formerly know as CloudVelocity, since contracted to CloudVelox, has emitted code to lift and shift networks from your bit barn to Amazon Web Services (AWS).…

We can't make this stuff up – Microsoft said this after Europe okayed its LinkedIn acquisition Microsoft says buying LinkedIn will help to address the middle class discontent that saw Britain vote to leave the European Union and America vote to leave politics as we know it behind by electing Donald Trump.…

Official line is they want to be CEOs elsewhere. Or is the culture change chafing? Two of EMC's most senior product line executives have resigned, deciding that Michael Dell's Dell Technologies and the David Goulden-run Dell EMC business unit is not their ideal future workplace.…

Goodbye drudgery - now you can script up your networking business workflows There's a few shiny boxes in the announcement, but Broadcom-bound Brocade hopes punters will find its automation software and DevOps story even more sparkly than its new kit.…

Yuge attacks. The best attacks. Terabit-scale attacks from internet things Big Switch Networks is taking aim at the kinds of IoT-based attacks that have rocked the Internet this year.…

HTTPS? They've heard of it Nearly a decade after it introduced assisted-GPS in its mobile chipsets, Qualcomm has squished a bug that allowed miscreants to mess around with people's location services, or crash their phones.…