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Canadian government says top ISPs have to share the broadband love The government of Canada has ruled that large broadband providers will have to open up their fiber data lines for use by smaller carriers.…

All your user data belongs to them over there A decision by a New York judge means that people's Facebook profiles are an open book to prosecutors armed with a warrant, despite the firm's best efforts.…

No right to privacy in an accidental one-way chat A US court of appeals has ruled that phone calls started by accident in your pocket – so-called butt dialing – can be lawfully recorded.…

Top investors pour on pressure as latest financial results disappoint Mobile chipmaker Qualcomm says it's putting its business under the microscope with an eye to restructuring after posting lackluster third-quarter results, including revenue that missed estimates.…

Facing impalation on their own bony proboscii Comment A venture-capitalist-tracking website has revealed a list of unicorns, which are startups valued at a billion dollars or more. Eight storage companies are in the list; does this mean a glorious outcome for them?…

If you want it fixed, upgrade to the El Capitan beta Code dive You can bypass Apple's space-age security and gain administrator-level privileges on an OS X Yosemite Mac using code that fits in a tweet.…

Now he wishes there was an anti-snoop clause in the GPL A respected security researcher has denied any involvement with Hacking Team after open-source code he wrote was found in smartphone spyware sold by the surveillance-ware maker.…

Rabble rousers demand FTC, DoJ into Music service A pressure group in America has urged US watchdog the FTC and Uncle Sam's Department of Justice to probe Apple Music for signs of antitrust violations.…

Bloke rigged systems so he knew which numbers would come next Iowa state lottery's IT security boss hacked his employer's computer system, and rigged the lottery so he could buy a winning ticket in a subsequent draw.…

Even that Sudan stuff wasn’t actually a weapon The Hacking Team pushed out a new statement on Wednesday, moaning that the only victim of the mega-breach against its systems is Hacking Team itself.…

Linux Foundation, Docker and friends opt for Open Container Initiative One month after launching an industry-wide consortium aimed at creating a common runtime and image format for application containers, Docker and the Linux Foundation say the effort is making rapid progress.…

Long haul low impact strap-on does like its dust Review I love what Eric Migovsky has done with the Pebble by creating an antidote to modern smartwatches. The two generations of Pebble so far have been useful, durable and practical – qualities which elude the over-specced and costly Apple and Android kit.…

Storage firm adds city-wide disaster recovery to its storage NexentaStor MetroHA provides high-availability at city-wide distances for NexentaStor shared storage arrays, making it viable for high-availability needs.…

But infrastructure refreshes are slowing, warns top man Tucci EMC basically saw off most signs of a storage slump with a two per cent revenue rise in its second quarter 2015, although with revenue being reduced after paying $75m in a VMware pricing settlement with the US government.…

Welcome to our Hell, computers Artificial intelligence scientists have developed a neural-network that understands incomprehensible scrawled drawings of the sort created by children, marketing departments, architects, design creatives, and so on.…

Pump-and-dump buck stops with arrests in Florida and Israel Federal authorities in America have charged five men who are being indirectly connected with the attack and data breach at JPMorgan Chase last summer, after the global bank, with total assets of $2.6tn, lost the contact data for millions of customers.…

Spies gonna spy, no matter where in the world they are Pakistan's intelligence agencies want to snoop on all communications crossing its borders.…

Look away from the static pricing for services... Cloud providers have taken a leaf out of the budget airlines playbook, with what looks like a suicidal price war masking static pricing on the added value services that customers actually need to run real businesses.…

Body denies it had plans to slurp more info NHS England has backed down from yet another data extraction scheme, after details emerged of backdoor plans to gather patient appointment information.…

Sounding alarms over sensitive info exposure Think checking doors and windows every night so as to stop burglars scrambling through to rob you. Well, now your personal data can be handled in the same way, with Druva's end-point protection services identifying risky exposure to sensitive information loss by scanning backed-up data and alerting compliance teams.…

Silicon chief to face money men in Big Larry's Lair Exclusive MariaDB is going after Oracle in its own back yard with plans for a fresh CEO drawn locally in order to tap funding from A-lister venture capitalists.…

Chocolate Factory seeks to extend design capability The Chocolate Factory has snapped up mobile app prototyping biz Pixate for an undisclosed sum.…

Plus: VMworld's like a 'high school reunion'

Are you serious, SatNad? In Depth After five years, the radical design experiment of Windows Phone is being killed off; Windows on phones is being subsumed into Windows 10, and alas, this means Windows phones will not only be less distinctive and inherit many of the flaws, but they’ll acquires some flaws no mobile platform today suffers.…

Alarmed authority notes near miss between passenger jet and quadcopter The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has complained of six incidents since May of last year in which boys and their toys almost collided with piloted craft in British airports' airspace.…

Apple 'woes' push price around despite firm doing rather well ARM posted bumper sales and profits for its second quarter results – yet shares at the Cambridge-based outfit were still dragged down by Apple's "disappointing" results.…

A bit light on white Persian cats, it must be said James Bond fans chomping at the bit to enjoy the forthcoming 24th cinematic outing for 007 can avail themselves of a light aperitif in the form of the full-length Spectre trailer.…

ECJ not expected to rule until autumn next year Uber will continue to ferry food around Barcelona but not people, as yet another court case involving the ride-sharing pseudo-taxi service is sent to the European Court of Justice.…

It must be true, Big Data says so Worstall on Wednesday What is it that Twitter is better at than Google at doing? Over and above the obvious point that Twatter is better at broadcasting 140 character apercus to the world, while Google is better at telling you the answer to something?…

Ditch Office for more open standards, says DISIC Microsoft could get the boot from the French government if a new recommendation from an official advisor is adopted.…

Close-ups for moons Nix and Hydra reveal new space oddities Information harvested during the recent Pluto flyby continues to stream slowly in from the New Horizons space probe as it carries on out into the Kuiper belt beyond the solar system as we know it.…

Their emails still reek, but non-English natives don't notice Nigerian 419 scammers have taken to the crime-as-a-service model using cash to plug their technical capability shortfalls to build malware campaigns that could be making millions, according to FireEye researchers.…

But bat their eyelids at women they think pose no threat Trick-cyclists from the University of NSW and Miami University have probably got themselves onto the “gamer-gate” hate list with a study that finds men who get fragged in online games really despise losing to a woman.…

And while we're at it, what exactly is a 'smidge'? Our recent foray into the remarkable world of Hawaiian-Japanese fusion post-pub cuisine prompted some entertaining commentard chatter.…

US$1.6bn revenue, 2,000 VSANs now in production, but no mention of EVO:RAIL VMware has posted what CEO Pat Gelsinger calls “solid” second quarter results that exceeded analysts expectations on earnings-per-share but fell short of hoped-for revenue growth.…

$200 MEEELLLION blown on buying goofy eyeballs Yahoo! has reported a US$22 million loss for the second quarter, as Marissa Mayer tries to buy market share off Google ad Facebook.…

Awareness? But everyone knows who we are! Given a relatively flat few years, it's probably no surprise that Cisco has told the warm bodies in its marketing departments to become cold-blooded revenue-generation machines.…

'Lexicocalorimeter' suggests if your socmed feed is full of fat, so are you Boffins from the USA and Australia have constructed a “ Lexicocalorimeter” that parses social media for mentions of food, discovering a correlation between people's wellbeing, and the foods and activities they mention on Twitter.…

You want to download config.php? Sure, why not? Outpost24 researcher Kasper Bertelsen is warning of several vulnerabilities in Joomla's Helpdesk Pro which can lead to remote code execution on servers.…

Sora throws CPU cores where RF wonks put ASICs Microsoft has decided to open-source its six-year-old Sora software radio project.…

New tricks nix fake clicks Google ad man Vegard Johnsen says tech big wigs including Facebook and Yahoo! have forged a giant blacklist to block fake web traffic contributing to advertising fraud.…

Sys admin/attorney-general George Brandis not welcome in the data centre Australian attorney-general George Brandis' plans to turn his department into a national telco chief security officer are to be carpet-bombed by a coalition of industry groups opposing the proposed laws.…

Home stretch for home entertainment mega-deal AT&T is nearing the finish line on its massive acquisition of DirecTV: the US Department of Justice (DoJ) has approved the biz gobble, and the head of the FCC pushed for his agency to give a formal green light.…

It's a close one, really close Apple has kept up its record pace, posting a third-quarter profit of $10.67bn (£6.43bn), up 38 per cent year on year, from revenues of $49.6bn (£31.8bn).…

Opposition party wakes up with hangover to find brand-new net filter tattoo on face As Australia's communications minister Malcolm Turnbull releases a survey designed to help justify the government's Internet not-a- filter legislation, the nation's opposition is showing signs of morning-after regret for waving the laws through parliament.…

Firefighters, cops etc should take down flying gizmos without fear of lawsuits, say politicos California politicians want emergency services to knock interfering drones out of the sky without fear of repercussion – after a gang of flying gizmos got in the way of firefighters tackling a terrifying blaze.…

But Windows 10 will change everything, right? Microsoft reported the largest quarterly loss in its history on Tuesday, after eating another $8.44bn in costs during the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2015, mostly related to its bungled Nokia gobble.…

So why do people continue not to believe it? Analysis For the third time in three years, Google has reiterated its position that it will not give a search ranking advantage to domain names with new internet top-level domains.…