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Commerical kit, not hacking, all that's needed. Melbourne man Paul Sant has been charged with unauthorised broadcasting over to pilots over radio bands restricted to aviation users, causing one plane to abort a landing to Tullamarine Airport.…

Altitude reading of 'below ground level' turned probe into Magrathean Whale The European Space Agency (ESA) has released results of its early investigations into the crash of the Schiaparelli Mars probe and it sounds like software may have been a part of the problem.…

Servers, books, virtualisation software, training and PCs at unusually attractive prices Black Friday and the Cyber Monday that follows have become big discount shopping days for consumers, but enterprise vendors are getting in on the act too with hefty discounts on training and some kit.…

70 heads get early Xmas gift delivered in P45 wrapping paper RM Education sprinkled some festive cheer among its staffers by confirming in a Skype call with them that redundancies are in the offing.…

Social media tracking... yep, this is the future This has not been a good year for opinion pollsters, most of whom failed to predict either Britain’s vote to leave the European Union or the election of Donald Trump as US president.…

But while the all-flash kit sales are up, hybrid arrays are down Analysis A considered look at Nimble Storage's latest quarterly results show that its all-flash array (AFA) sales are rising but hybrid product sales are falling, suggesting some cannibalisation is going on.…

Brainier students? Maybe. New hardware, almost certainly HPC Blog SMERSH! That was the sound of the Student Cluster Competition LINPACK record being shattered – in a huge way. How huge? Really huge. As in more than doubled.…

Ordinary Americans can't afford it, it's not a yuge deal President-elect Donald Trump's online shop has released a tremendous ornament, the best ornament, for Christmas trees.…

Cortana in a box? Maybe not Microsoft isn’t in a rush to follow Amazon and Google by planting a pair of creepy listening ears in your living room, disguised as a robot buddy. Microsoft’s fabled “Home Hub” may not even be hardware at all.…

Dung it! You need the loose change, etc Time is ticking away if you want to enter NASA's competition for the public to suggest an astronaut ablution solution.…

China Mobile's doing it, though. You arguing with 497m customers? MBBF2016 Mobile carriers should only adopt 5G "if we're able to create new markets", Craig Ehrlich of the Global TD-LTE Initiative (GTI) has warned the mobile network industry, adding: "If 5G does not focus on that then we're buying a lot of equipment and [just] talking a lot of hype."…

The next stage in the Nexsan saga involves NXSN + Comment Imation has reached an agreement to sell its Nexsan storage array and Connected Data subsidiaries to private equity company Spear Point Capital Management in a non-cash deal.…

Some limitations but most things work First Look Microsoft has released a public preview of SQL Server for Linux, and I took it for a spin.…

It's like ARM all over again... and Ingram Micro... and Hinkley Skyscanner, the Scottish travel search business, has been acquired by Chinese competitor Ctrip in a deal valued at £1.4bn.…

NB-IoT looms as a network tech Godzilla MBBF2016 Narrowband-Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is the IoT networking technology most favoured by big telcos. Softbank tried demonstrating it today at Huawei's Global Mobile Broadband Forum – and it didn't go to plan.…

It's all soooo intelligent The BPI has embraced the post-human era, with a report of the use of AI in music by consultancy MusicAlly.…

40 per cent less tedium and weepy backstories than the Olympics HPC Blog So who are the kids competing in the SC16 Student Cluster Competition this year? What are their hopes, their dreams – what makes them tick? Why did they travel all the way to Salt Lake City to chase the Cluster Crown? (There is no actual crown, but there should be, right?)…

Think of ways to make money from all these bright ideas GMBBF2016 Huawei rotating co-CEO Ken Hu today announced the company’s new X Labs initiative, which is aimed at helping stimulate the inevitable “ecosystem” for the wireless comms market.…

VMware-friendly facility Rackspace has chosen Germany as home for its first data centre in mainland Europe.…

It's supposed to be a server design rule shakeup. Here's what we know so far Analysis HPE is undertaking the single most determined and ambitious architectural redesign of a server’s architecture in recent history in the shape of The Machine.…

Vuln seeker saus EMET has 13 protections Win 10 doesn't Microsoft should reverse its planned axing of the lauded Enhanced Mitigation Toolkit (EMET) as Windows 10 cannot yet match its level of security, according to Carnegie Mellon University CERT furniture Will Dormann.…

Virtzilla has one other security worry too, in Identity Manager VMware's popped out a couple of security advisories, one of which helps it in a perverse way.…

Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group waves baseball bat at slapdash Thing-makers The heavyweights behind the Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group (BITAG) are sick of Internet of Things (IoT) startups foisting insecure rubbish on consumers, and have fired a report that looks like a stern warning that IoT bandwagon-hoppers need to get their houses in order.…

Rating Impact, not theoretical severity, is goal of 'Non-Intrusive and Context-Based Vulnerability Scoring' If you're in charge of a couple of thousand boxen, you can't patch every vulnerability report at once, so sysadmins will welcome help sorting out their priorities.…

Bits of Freedom research discovers unsavoury continental back-door preferences European Union (EU) citizens can now get an idea of what their governments want – and are doing about – cryptography regulation.…

Because UAVs should hitch a ride when it makes no sense to burn batteries Robotics boffins have landed an autonomous quadcopter on a car moving at 50 km/h and think doing so might just change the drone business.…

One in the eye for ISPs, which will be asked to block streams of stuff legal to do but too dirty to watch Film censors in the United Kingdom will be able to ban Brits from accessing websites that stream especially kinky X-rated videos, if a proposed change in the law gets up.…

Using location tracking to track protestors is possible, but now verboten under policy change Twitter will begin clamping down on unauthorised police surveillance of its users.…

Saffire II experiment data revealed in all its inflammatory glory VIDEOS NASA's released the videos of its Saffire II experiment, in which the space agency borrowed the Mythbuster's incendiary habits and burned stuff in space.…

x86 bit test emulation clamps 64-bit values when it shouldn't The Xen Project has issued eight security advisories for its open source hypervisor.…

Tidying up the artefacts of the 90s should make things more secure and efficient Debian is preparing to revise its default file system mapping to bring it in in line with other major distributions (like Fedora and CentOS).…

Flawed desktop publishing tool for readers of Urdu and Arabic phlayed with phishing Attackers are compromising government and banks across Asia by exploiting a years-old zero day vulnerability in desktop publishing application InPage, which targets users working in Urdu or Arabic.…

Calls for audit of votes in key swing states just to make sure nothing went awry Donald Trump's surprise win in the United States' presidential election could conceivably be attributed to illegal hacking and needs to be investigated, according to a security expert.…

In the Navy, we sink thanks to HPE! In the Navy, we leak data with much ease! The United States Navy has revealed that the names and social security numbers on 134,386 current and former has leaked, thanks to the compromise of a laptop used by a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Services staffer.…

Technology industry already hitting the brakes on distracted driver push The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has proposed voluntary guidelines [PDF] designed to reduce driver distraction by mobile devices in vehicles.…

Navy's $4.4bn next-gen destroyer might make it to home port one day The US Navy's most advanced ship yet, the $4.4bn stealth destroyer USS Zumwalt, has had to be ignominiously towed through the Panama Canal after its engines failed yet again.…

No more 5-second checkouts The EU banking regulator’s plans to reduce fraud by obliging the use of passwords, codes or a card reader to authenticate electronic payments above 10 euros have drawn fire from the payments industry.…

It's only a test Barclays is trialling smartphone cash withdrawals.…

Public cloud and Huawei cited among culprits Analysis HPE's latest results show a company emerging slimmer and fitter through diet (cost-cutting) and exercise (spin-merger deals) but facing tougher markets in servers and storage – the new normal, as CEO Meg Whitman says.…

Nothing to see here. Move along As an ostensible courtesy to internet customers now facing 1TB monthly data caps, Comcast has begun notifying those approaching their quotas through popup browser windows.…

No business rate tax for pure fibre for next five years Businesses rolling out pure fibre in the UK are to be exempt from paying land rates over the next five years, Chancellor Philip Hammond's announced in a reprieve to providers in his Autumn Statement today.…

Juicy tidbits of what's to come ahead of user conference Amazon Web Services will announce a PostgreSQL compatible managed cloud service during its re:Invent conference next week, according to reports.…

Ofcom also hints at deadlock with former monopoly regarding legal separation BT is the only player to offer its services for universal coverage of 10Mbps by 2020, but has also placed a number of conditions on doing so, head of comms regulator Ofcom Sharon White has said.…

US pres also gives daps to Gateses for $36bn charity toss President Barack Obama has awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to two women who made enormous contributions to the history of computing – COBOL co-inventor Grace Hopper and Apollo programmer Margaret Hamilton.…

640kB? Enough for anyone Microsoft's nerd goggles require only a humble PC. But then who needs more than 640kB?…

Plus: Learn about virtualization... from sci-fi writers?

Baddies stole food, not credit card data, protests firm Customers of online takeaway firm Deliveroo are getting their accounts hijacked and charged for food they never ordered, according to an investigation by BBC One's Watchdog.…

Fix completed, says Redmond, it's just being deployed... Outlook users are still struggling to get their email clients to synchronise with Microsoft's servers.…

This is for computers, not your reams of paper! Sysadmin blog We always design our data centres and server rooms with the best of intentions. A nice, enclosed space with excellent ventilation and air conditioning, sufficient power points to ensure circuits are never overloaded, and enough space to get at both the front and back sides of the rack – ideally all cordoned off into its own room so nobody has to listen to the noise or be perpetually chilled to the bone.…

Time for the ol' mid-year refresh Phone makers used to "refresh" their annual flagships by flinging out one in a new colour. But in today's hyper-competitive market, where flagships are forgotten almost as soon as they appear, apparently that isn't enough. HTC and OnePlus have each given their ranges mid-year revamps with new specs, cases, and fancy new names. Both revamps arrive with Android 7.0 Nougat.…