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Songwriters aren't asking Uncle Sam for help. So why are you? Guest opinion Last year Spotify hired a former political strategist in the Obama administration and some of Pandora’s lobbyists to protect its untenable and money-losing business model. I predict that the end goal of these efforts will leave artists and songwriters worse off.…

Coalition formed to oppose 'misguided' legislation that will help hackers, hurt research Infosec heavyweights are uniting to oppose US government proposals to tighten up export controls against software exploits, a move critics argue threatens to imperil mainstream security research and information sharing.…

Clustered, cloud crew Data centre operating system hopeful Mesophere has rolled out programs and tools targeting developers and prospective partners.…

Mobile strategy 101? 'What I mean is...' Satya Nadella has been hitting the road to undo the damage to perceptions of Microsoft's mobile strategy caused last week by, um… Satya Nadella.…

Company sorry for the inconvenience caused. Great Epic Games, known for its Unreal Engine and the Games of War series, sent a grovelling letter to its forum users this morning explaining that a hack "may have resulted in unauthorised access to your username, email address, password, and the date of birth you provided at registration."…

Aims to charm fanbois with adware removal tool Security software firm Malwarebytes is moving into the Mac security software market with the acquisition of a start-up and the launch of its first anti-malware product for Apple computers.…

Damning review was censored – but we've seen the full report Domain-name overseer ICANN's pivotal role in a controversial fight over .africa is today revealed in full for the first time.…

Moz shop's rebuild-the-fox plan begins to take shape For some time now Firefox, the once mighty web browser, has been bleeding market share and – perhaps more importantly – developer mind share.…

GSM-R base station deal covers frequency updates and new hardware Nokia Networks is trumpeting an eight-year contract incorporating the sale of over 2,000 mobile base stations – and a GSM-R frequency band upgrade – to Deutsche Bahn, Germany's national railway company.…

Cheil merger wrangles set to continue A Samsung exec has vowed to offer up a "big" win in the company's "war" against shouty investment firm Elliot, as the battle hots up over its objection to Sammy's imminent merger.…

No food or job? Well, at least your playlists are safe iThingy flinger Apple has decided enough is enough with poor old Greece, helping solve the EU nation's debt crisis with an offer of free iCloud services - for a month, anyway.…

'Doesn't taste like seaweed at all,' enthuses boffin There's possibly disturbing, possibly uplifting news today on the science beat, depending how much you like bacon and/or things grown in bubbling vats.…

Actually just ordinary folk getting some privacy rights Ordinary people value their online reputations, and are the main users of the so-called "right to be forgotten" European ruling, Google data has revealed.…

Believe it or not, torching existing stock and starting over may work out cheaper Throughout my career I have seen many Windows releases with minimum requirements that were a little bit deceiving. Sure, the machines would boot, but you would sometimes have enough time to brew a fresh pot of coffee before the computer was in a usable state.…

The next stage in China’s world domination plans – buying Micron

Splatter your digital fluid all OVER than screen Google has mashed the Processing graphics language into its Cast software, letting visual artists and others with a bent for graphics point their creations at the nearest big-screen TV.…

Benefits, costs and performance HPC blog + vid I recently had a conversation with Pat McGinn, product manager at Cool IT. Fortunately I recorded our chat, then matched it up with some slides to package it into a webcast.…

Latest rock-zapping by nuclear laser tank yields strange results NASA's nuclear-powered Curiosity rover has aimed its ChemCam laser at some unusually light-coloured rocks on Mars and discovered a surprising similarity between them and the rocks of Earth's granitic continental crust.…

‘New legislative framework’ needed, says RUSI report Blighty's Independent Surveillance Review, commissioned by former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg and conducted by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), has concluded that spy agencies aren't breaking the law - and recommends a new legislative framework and oversight regime.…

Your customers' cat vids will be safe and dispatchable aboard this Micron has revved its middle-of-the-road M500DC SSD with smaller cells and boosted security to turn out a cost-optimised SSD which it says will take over more work from spinning disks.…

Brussels moves like striking cobra, looks to achieve October agreement The second round of negotiations on the new EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) saw real movement on Tuesday, according to negotiators.…

50 legal letters land in six months as spooks seek insights into traffic Content delivery network CloudFlare says it has received 50 court orders in the first half of this year, more than double that clocked in the whole of 2014.…

Or giving the money back A former Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) lecturer has been sentenced to a year in prison, after videotaping himself as he robbed a Manhattan bank last year.…

Redmond wants to work where the grunt is, not where power is puny Microsoft and Georgia University researchers have developed a system that can make wearable devices up to nine times faster with four times the battery life by offloading processing to traditional mobile devices.…

Better to rebuild later than over-invest now, says network builder +comment nbn™ , the entity charged with building and operating Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN), has argued it is better to re-configure its fibre-to-the-node network than to build it to handle high levels of traffic.…

Retro-gamers rejoice: there's an Amiga emulator aboard Video The Commodore PET, a beloved micro-computer of the late 1970s, is coming back as an Android phablet.…

New mums will be able to ship nature's finest food to junior IBM will start a breast-milk-delivery-as-a-service offering for female employees and their kids.…

XP rump now carrion for hackers as malware removal tool pulled, A-V updates cease Windows XP holdouts are even more danger than ever after Microsoft abandoned anti-malware support for the ancient platform.…

Some see a dog or a heart in NASA snap, we see SASQUATCH NASA has announced that the New Horizons spacecraft has phoned home after passing behind Pluto. All systems are apparently nominal, the craft has recorded just the amount of data NASA hoped for and images and analysis are beaming their way back across the solar system as you read this story.…

A little bit of Snowden paranoia and a whole lot of economic stimulus India is reportedly pondering a new policy that would see only home-baked silicon used in its military, space program and atomic energy industry.…

Non-penguins finally allowed into Chocolate Factory's cloud club, with hybrid options Google's Cloud Platform has offered any operating system you want, so long as it's Linux. But as of this week you can also run Windows Server in the company's cloud.…

Screeching U-turn on what was touted not that long ago The CEO of discussion-board website Reddit has barely been in the job for a few days, and already he's managed to arouse the ire of some redditors.…

Compliance-conscious folk get SmsSaaS: Slightly-more-secure-software-as-a-service Salesforce has launched its slightly-more-secure-software-as-a-service for organisations in industries compelled to wrap themselves in red tape.…

Chocolate Factory asking users to police themselves with edits Google is set to reopen its Maps service to user-submitted edits and labels albeit through a new moderating process.…

AArch64 build aimed at testing and development Suse has made a version of its eponymous enterprise Linux distro available for hardware vendors who want to deliver products to market based on 64-bit ARM processors, in a new expansion of its partner program.…

Bulk phone record snooping is no longer allowed, privacy watchdog cries The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is suing James Clapper – the US Director of National Intelligence – and other government bigwigs to stop the NSA from gathering innocent citizens' phone records in bulk.…

Why this three-billion-mile journey was worth it Comment With everyone going ape over the stunning crisp pictures from NASA's New Horizons probe of the dwarf freezeworld Pluto, there are few voices asking if it was worth sending out a space probe to the far end of the Solar System – but it wasn't always that way.…

59 flaws, many critical, affecting Office desktops, RDP servers, Hyper-V systems, etc Microsoft has released fixes for 59 CVE-listed vulnerabilities in its software – including a patch for the elevation-of-privilege flaw in Windows exploited by spyware maker Hacking Team.…

Apple isn't the only one that wants to track your smartphone Google has jumped on the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacon bandwagon with a set of open standards and software interfaces to give Apple's iBeacon a run for its money.…

Snowden's pal SSSSick of getting TSA shakedowns Filmmaker Laura Poitras, who won an Oscar for the Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour, is suing the US government to find out why she spent six years being repeatedly harassed by border security guards.…

How someone was able to buy bloomberg.market and, er, move the market Twitter's shares jumped four per cent this morning after a fake news story claimed the biz had received a $31bn buyout offer.…

Ha - that made ya think, didn't it? HP will resell Seagate's Lustre-ous ClusterStor 1500 and 9000 high-performance computing arrays, while Seagate is adding IBM's Spectrum Scale parallel file system to ClusterStor alongside Lustre.…

Mighty Large Hadron Collider traps squealing ultrateeny thingy Pic Physicists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider say they have discovered the pentaquark – a class of subatomic particles never seen before. The LHCb collaboration team has submitted a paper reporting these findings to the journal Physical Review Letters.…

With these data building bricks you could build a data ... shed? DDN has an entry-level Lustre appliance called the ES7K, EXAScaler 7000.…

Software portfolio looks like a nicotine addict's buttocks Adobe has released patches for its Flash software to fix a pair of critical security vulnerabilities exposed by the Hacking Team megabreach. The bugs can be exploited to hijack PCs and infect them with malware – and crooks are already doing just that, so apply the updates now.…