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From inventive storylines to theoretical thinking Page File The Scientific Secrets of Doctor Who is what you might call a publication with a rather bastardised nature, being both a new anthology of Doctor Who short stories with quotations included from the TV series, and short essays about the relevant attached science.…

Epic tale of idiot sysadmin and the trek to clean up the mess left behind On-Call Reg readers are awesome and none more so that JT Smith, who sent us an epic tale of the time he was called out to solve a backup problem.…

But just not in the way you think Worstall @ the Weekend We have a nice little empirical proof that Adam Smith really was right about us all being guided by that invisible hand. Yeah, I know, you're sooo tired of the free market maniac telling you that governments are all wet and laissez faire is where it should be.…

Could 'GG1' bring yet more Glassholes? Google has been quietly beavering away at a new Bluetooth-enabled product with the not-exactly discreet ID tag of A4R-GG1.…

Pay $5 shipping fee and the viewer is all yours. Or not Google's VR face goggles, dubbed Cardboard, were being given away for free, plus shipping by OnePlus. Until – that is – the smartphone maker sold out of the devices.…

Our Vulture locks the two in a cage together Review Over the last few years, the market for e-readers and books has managed to both consolidate and grow. Many more people have an e-reading device, or use tablets to read, while at the same time the number of players has shrunk.…

And all that SNES ... Vid A precious prototype of what appears to be a Nintendo-Sony Playstation has been paraded online, after the console was discovered languishing in a "box of junk".…

Substantial Dutch trough for the culinarily challenged We're obliged to readers who answered our recent call for post-pub nosh neckfiller suggestions, and rest assured we now have a extensive menu planned for the coming months, based on your input.…

How the cloud kept me in the clouds for 17 soul-crushing hours The Airbus A380 has a range of 15,200km, but the longest scheduled commercial flight using the aircraft is the 13,804km Dallas (USA) to Sydney (Australia) jaunt flown by Australia's Qantas.…

Burn baby burn, kitchen inferno Something for the Weekend, Sir? Want a new driveway? No problem, mate. Fix your garage door? Sorted. Oh, what, you want the the garage door to open on to the driveway? Oh no no no no, no can do, pal, that’s not done, they is sep’rate. Tell you what, though, I got a mate who could build you a shortcut so you can get the car from the drive to the garage through the back garden.…

Ethical hacking undergrad from Northumbria Uni falls foul of 'ethics board' An ethical hacking student at the University of Northumbria has claimed that the university's ethics board and the Wassenaar Arrangement have forced him to delete some references to exploits from his final year dissertation.…

Echoes from the ghosts of sTec and OCZ's past A storage memory appliance to process massive Big Data sets in real-time is being developed by startup Levyx, with help from Toshiba and the reviving OCZ business in the flash department.…

Madagascarine Mirzas' mighty nads equivalent to grapefruit sized on human chaps Scientists are marvelling at a lemur with testicles so large that were a human chap to carry equivalent plums in his trouser department, they'd be the size of a couple of grapefruit.…

Tests show key processes will be undisturbed come 2100 Those who fear that the oceans and their ability to support life on Earth may be doomed by rising CO – take heart!…

Not so hard without your horses and dogs, are ya? Eh? EH? Shaken members of a Cambridgeshire sports club have recounted a terrifying ordeal at the jaws of a rampaging fox.…

'Didn't make any such plea anyway, what everr', tweets Wikileaks Assange: Can I come and live in you, pretty please? France: No, you can’t come and live here! Assange: Never wanted to anyway!…

'Are we socially responsible and honest? Hell, no. We’re Wikipedia' Just as we predicted only yesterday, Wikipedia has proclaimed a famous “victory” over something that was never going to happen.…

'Urban transport revolution' crushed by Madame la Republique Ride-sharing app Uber announced on Friday that it was ditching its French service.…

MVNO offers ‘sincere’ apology to customers. Cheers for that MVNO Vectone Mobile's service has been down for days, with the company offering no indication as to when it might resume, or any public statement acknowledging the depth of the problem.…

DDN and HDS lead the high-end market, but others will join in soon Comment I love the concept of hyperconvergence. Who doesn’t? An IT infrastructure built out of relatively balanced (and small) nodes, all contributing together to a large pool of computing and storage resources, which can linearly scale just by adding more nodes.…

It plugs a hole, but where are the profits? Loss-making cloud biz Outsourcery has managed to tap up Vodafone for a £4m loan under a partnership deal.…

Mobe firm tinkers a bit and promises to do better Ofcom has whacked EE with a £1m fine for failing to comply with the regulator's rules on handling customer complaints.…

Golden Balls doesn't ask about the price. Why would he? Fashion model and former one-footed footie ace David Beckham walks into a phone shop and finds it all rather confusing, or so a new US television commercial for mobile operator Sprint would have us believe.…

Engineers batter tentacles with rubber mallets A thing you not have known: the tail of a seahorse is a square prism rather than the typical cylindrical shape normally expected in tails. Researchers have now investigated what mechanical performance advantages this may provide, and reckon it has immense robotic applications.…

Build 10162 comes with ISO download, WiFi purchase Microsoft's "Windows Insider" fast track is living up to its name, with build 10162 released yesterday, making it three builds in four days since 10158 appeared on 29 June.…

Who wants to live forever? Film review Director Tarsem Singh has something of a fascination with technology and medicine. His first film, The Cell, posited using a virtual reality mind meld system and his latest, Self/Less, is all about swapping minds though the power of high tech.…

Vienna court says it has no jurisdiction in misuse of personal data case The Vienna Regional Court has thrown out a case against Facebook brought by Austrian Max Schrems, on procedural grounds.…

Le Charteur des Snoopeurs interferes with EU rights list, say aggrieved folk Dutch MEP Sophie In’t Veld has accused the European Commission of fence-sitting over France’s new “Patriot Act”.…

But it would be useful for research Poll It will definitely be possible within the foreseeable future to bring back the long-extinct woolly mammoth, a top geneticist has said. However, in his regretful opinion such a resurrection should not be carried out.…

Religion, formal education, classical music? What’s that? If you thought that British TV drama was getting cheaper and there was less of it, Ofcom has just confirmed your hunch.…

Dangle dongle for frustrated axemen Review Music gear manufacturer IK Multimedia will be 20 years old next year. It’s known to many these days for its iOS gadgets, but the Italian company began with software development focused on digital signal processing, producing standalone sound-creation apps and plug-in effects. One of its earliest creations, T-Racks, was dynamics processing software based on valve (toob) emulation.…

PCI Council policy update lets security admins play with crypto LEGO The payments card industry (PCI) council has reviewed its guidance to encourage businesses to stop slinging credit card data in cleartext by giving the tick to encryption solutions built from different components, rather than products that handle every step of data's journey from merchant to banker.…

'Our IT guy just let me trigger a total network outage' Data centres are loud, noisy places. So loud, it's often hard for anyone to hear your screams and cries of frustration when Murphy decides to make you the example for his law.…

If you want more, join this orderly queue, maybe forever, say number wonks The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) can no longer satisfy requests for new IPv4 addresses and has started a waitlist for those who want more.…

'We fixed that stuff last year', company says, 'but have a new client anyway' Hong Kong virtual private network provider PureVPN has rejected claims in a study published this week that its service among many other popular providers are open to DNS hijacking and has pushed fixes to shore up security.…

Police who found it were only following orders, they say The German rozzers raided a villa in a wealthy suburb of Kiel on Wednesday (July 2), and found a Nazi tank from 1943 hidden in the cellar, alongside a torpedo and "other weaponry".…

Check out check-me-outs to jam shopping queues Mastercard will begin using selfies as a means to verify payments.…

You can stop the auto-installs, save your LAN, stay out of court and get home in time for dinner From July 29th, as we've reported, Windows 10 downloads will start to become available.…

You may experience “inability to connect” to Microsoft's cloud in the Australia East region Microsoft's Azure service is experiencing TITSUP - Total Inability To Support Usual Performance - for some Australian users.…

Server, storage and switch sales surge 25 per cent, says IDC Happy days, hardware-sellers, box-peering-abacus-wielder IDC says sales of cloudy kit surged by a whopping 25 per cent in 2015's first quarter.…

31,000--core HPC sim shows Beta Pictoris b's dust cloud dancing video Beta Pictoris, a research favourite among astro-boffins since the discovery of its bright debris-and-dust disk in 1984, has yielded new wonders in a NASA supercomputer simulation.…

Intel Compute Stick with Ubuntu emerges at US$110 and super low-end spec Intel's Compute Stick, the Atom-powered, plug-this-into-your-tellie-over-HDMI femto-PC, is now available with Ubuntu pre-installed.…

RPi-powered rig suited to Snowdenistas keen to dodge plod Rhino Security founder Benjamin Caudill has created a tool to help privacy pundits and criminals to connect to wireless networks from a distance of four kilometres, in a bid to foil eavesdropping authorities.…

Subreddits in lockdown as unpaid moderators protest shock exit of popular staffer 4chan-with-upvotes Reddit is in turmoil after a staffer much loved by the website's users suddenly left the business. Now the unpaid volunteer moderators of the site have turned against the admins aka the employees of Reddit.…

Baseball club boots out director as details on database compromise surface The St Louis Cardinals baseball team has sacked its director of scouting over the alleged unauthorized access of a rival team's computer database.…

Turning it off and on again not possible until a dealer fixes it Ford is recalling 433,000 of its cars as they suffer from a software bug that could prevent drivers from turning off their engines.…

Not everyone will get it all at once Microsoft has shared more details about how it plans to roll out Windows 10 beginning later this month.…

Tokyo wants to avoid head-to-head with Amazon Tokyo-headquartered NTT Communications has ruled out a head-to-head public-cloud fight with Amazon Web Services – despite NTT expanding its cloud systems globally.…

No shark-mounted monsters – instead these web-flinging podules will be airborne Facebook has been showing off a new laser communications system that CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to mount on massive solar-powered drones to beam the internet to inaccessible parts of the world.…

Little sign of turnaround at the Ministry of Justice on Peter Shetler's watch Australia's Department of Communications on Thursday announced the appointment of Paul Shetler as Chief Executive Officer for the Digital Transformation Office (DTO), communications minister Malcolm Turnbull's effort to digitise government services. But an examination of his recent work suggests that one of the major projects he oversaw went backwards on his watch.…