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Assistant infrastructure minister Jamie Briggs Tweets up a storm Mere weeks after Australia's government passed its metadata retention laws, a junior minister has - perhaps jokingly - threatened to use them against a journalist.…

Beak says patent language means what Nv says it means Nvidia has won an important early victory in its ongoing patent litigation against Qualcomm and Samsung, with a judge in the US International Trade Commission ruling in Nvidia's favor as to the language of the disputed patents.…

TV funnyman John Oliver gives whistleblower a hard time Vid One of the more unusual interviews with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden left the fugitive reduced to describing freedom-chilling, globe-spanning spy programs in terms of sexy selfies.…

Kubernetes container control freak is in ... but Docker is out Container-happy Linux upstart CoreOS has launched a beta program for a new distribution of software designed to let enterprises run their own infrastructures the way large-scale software companies like Google run theirs.…

James Clerk Maxwell's house Geek's Guide to Britain Say the the word “radio” and the mind goes to Guglielmo Marconi, the Italian emigrant whose work on the watershed of Cornwall and the Atlantic Ocean helped turn wireless into the defining medium of the early 20th Century.…

Little mixer won’t excite but it cuts the mustard in the city Vulture at the Wheel As befits the company most closely associated with the technology, Toyota/Lexus now has a hybrid for you, no matter what size car you're after.…

Do the sums, folks. You won't be disappointed Data protection companies have multiplied in the past 10 years and they are locked in a bitter battle for market share.…

Cheap as chips Wintel laptop in 'actually rather good' shocker Review Like or loathe Chromebooks, the marque offers security and convenience at an affordable price. And for the most part they are lightweight with a touch of style. Up until now Chromebooks had a monopoly on that combination but HP has cooked up some competition with its Stream Cloud range of budget Windows machines.…

Researchers see bright future in camera chip Vid Boffins working for Caltech have developed a tiny, high-resolution 3D imager that they hope could eventually be used in consumer devices such as smartphones.…

What a feeling for $533m infringement-saddled Apple Apple may end up getting a helping hand from its mega smartphone rival Samsung, after the South Korean electronics giant convinced US regulators to look at two Smartflash LLC patents.…

Soon gonna be proton-smashing 'til the break of dawn The world's mightiest particle accelerator was resurrected this morning, following a two-year shutdown to upgrade the proton-shattering Large Hadron Collider.…

Well, someone's got to do it Worstall @ the Weekend I have been set a task by Reg Commentard Salamander: to critique or defend the offshore finance system. This should be easy enough as I'm clearly a pig dog running lackey of the plutocrats and so the answer is just yes. Whatever they pay me to say.…

And why are all these cables cut? AND WHERE IS YOUR IT MANAGER? On-call Welcome to On-call, our getting-a-bit-more-regular look at the odd things readers experience when called out to do things at night.…

If fast shooting brakes are cool, this is from planet Hoth Vulture at the Wheel If it weren’t for the colour it would be something of a Q-car – a pragmatic small estate with lots of toys and a badge that says “I like quality, but I don’t want a German car”. But the colour, best described by Sniffpetrol as “Smurf Blue”, is the giveaway. Volvo call it “Rebel Blue” and my son thinks it's Manga Blue, but I think Sniff sums it up best.…

Get your laughing gear round lángos – Budapest's wobbly dining classic Last month, we ventured onto the streets of the Czech Republic to bring our wobbly dining fans smažený sýr – a deep-fried cheese delicacy entirely suitable for post-pub consumption.…

Cops claim mammaries 'n' genitals go in same category A 38-year-old Australian woman, who flashed her bresticles at a Google Street View spycar, has been accused of disorderly behaviour.…

Malware campaign tricks $1m out of enterprise orgs Infosec experts have spotted a nasty variant of a banking malware – dubbed Dyre Wolf – which involves a sophisticated two-factor authentication workaround that has apparently led to the theft of more than $1m from the biz world.…

Physics prof: 'An oxymoron, a crazy idea. AND YET' Scientists believe they have uncovered an important finding that could help future advanced electronics research – and it's all courtesy of some frustrated magnets.…

Bill Gates: I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords It's 40 years to the day since computer software company Microsoft started life under Bill Gates and Paul Allen.…

Cupertino's wrist action includes a two-finger heartbeat option Apple has released a series of videos to promote its wrist-puter ahead of its planned launch later this month.…

Plus: The return of Chelsea Manning QuoTW The first days of April saw the death of OnLine, the judgement of TrueCrypt and Cisco going insane for the Embrane.…

Liberate your inner Litchfield Review When Eyefi launched its first wireless-enabled SD cards nearly 10 years ago, they had the promise to free photographers from the grind of having to repeatedly take the card out of their camera and insert it into their computer to transfer images. Eyefi meant that, for the first time, images captured could be instantly sent to any computer on the same Wi-Fi network. For the studio-based photographer, this looked like being a major time-saver.…

Plus, scatological self help in 10% Human Page File Irvine Welsh has maintained a phenomenal work rate and consistency over the last two decades. A Decent Ride is his new novel and reprises one of his characters from previous works: "Juice" Terry Lawson who Welsh aficionados will remember as the incorrigibly priapic one in Glue and Porno.…

Where's Kanye when you need him? Something for the Weekend, Sir? This was a contradictory week for the music industry. It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.…

Senator is 'deeply concerned' over disclosure of candid pics Prominent US Senator Al Franken is calling on the FBI to do more to fight "revenge porn" sites.…

Self-destructing pic app reports pittance of gov't requests Images sent via self-destructing selfie service Snapchat may not disappear as reliably as it once advertised, but it turns out that if you want to post incriminating messages without them getting snooped by authorities, Snapchat is still a pretty good place to do it.…

140 characters per message, for 35 years or less After being held virtually incommunicado for more than three years, Chelsea Manning, WikiLeaks' first US military mole, has set up a Twitter account and relayed her first messages from inside Fort Leavenworth military prison.…

Apple far from alone in 'flexi-gate' debacle Vid The bending epidemic that beset Apple's latest iPhone models is not isolated to Cupertinian kit, according to testers.…

Yet more defunct hardware to clutter up the cupboard Subscribers to the OnLive cloud gaming service have just 27 days of playing time left before the corporate servers that host their fragging sessions are to be shut down by Sony, which announced that it had acquired the service on Thursday.…

New language in W3C standard twisted its arm Microsoft has reversed its position on the contentious Do Not Track (DNT) browser feature, saying Internet Explorer will no longer send DNT signals to websites by default.…

Spread the power, internet community tells non-profit Domain name overseer ICANN is likely to go through a radical reorganization if it wants to be given more control of critical internet functions, currently run under contract from the US government.…

Thinking caps on for our LOHAN acronym challenge Competition As promised earlier this week, today we're giving readers the chance to win an all-new RockBLOCK Mk2 Iridium satellite comms unit, courtesy of our chums at Rock Seven.…

Analysing slides through a microscope is 'archaic' Comment Have I got cancer? “Maybe," says my oncologist, “so I’m going to take a biopsy and we’ll have a look.”…

Crony capitalism claims under the 'scope – and he won’t be bought The US Senate’s subcommittee on antitrust and competition will investigate why President Obama’s political appointees at the top of the FTC closed an investigation into Google.…

Keep the kids - and neighbours - happy this Easter Product roundup After receiving an email with the recommended specs needed to run Witcher 3, I reckoned that if I’m going to have to update my graphics card, then I might as well update my headset too. Experiencing immersive surround sound and can make a huge difference to enjoying high-intensity games where split-second decision-making means getting eaten by a Griffin or not. Hearing a shuffling Xenomorph round the corner before I get a visual on it and the chance to hide in a cupboard could be the difference between life and death.…

Is it enough to turn into a fully-fledged lover? Review April brings not just showers but traditionally a new release of Ubuntu, this time 15.04. With Ubuntu 15.04 will come Xubuntu and with that an update to Linus Torvalds’ briefly favoured Linux desktop (Xfce), version 4.12.…

Google claims its security is on the up (the only way it could go) Android has been known to be the mobile malware industry's operating system of choice. Now Google has published a report claiming infection rates on Android devices are much lower than you might expect.…

DiFi wants Anarchist Cookbook, Al Qaeda mag scrubbed from the internet Senator Dianne Feinstein is calling for a pair of controversial instructionals to be banned from the internet.…

Deals with labels for Spotify rival in secondary screening Apple is once again in the headlights of oncoming government regulators, this time over its forthcoming iTunes music-streaming service.…

Also: 'Christian' pizza parlor gets pwned and massive payday Indiana's politicians are racing to "clarify" the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) that has caused such a kerfuffle in the state.…

Save America's economy: Do as we say – and GIVE US MORE MONEY Analysis Fresh from pressuring politicians in Indiana, Arkansas and Arizona to backtrack on social policy, Silicon Valley is heading to Washington DC to push the startup mindset into public policy discussions.…

Joins Google in shunning CNNIC – the Middle Kingdom's root certificate authority Firefox-maker Mozilla has joined Google in refusing to recognize SSL certificates issued by the China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC).…

Officials rock up at illegal taxi service's base for second time An Uber employee has been arrested for allegedly obstructing a police raid in Amsterdam in the Netherlands earlier today (Thursday).…

Disk encryption wonder-tool probed amid developer disappearing act The researchers behind the security audit of the TrueCrypt disk-encryption software have completed their work and say they have found no evidence of any deliberate backdoors or serious design flaws in its code.…

Telco monster wants to rollout out 2Gb/s broadband in Atlanta, rest of the US So soon after Google promised Atlanta, Georgia, gigabit broadband, Comcast has said it will offer 2Gbps internet to homes in the city – and millions more Americans by 2016.…

'I've got lots of Asian friends' A UK Independence Party candidate has claimed hackers broke into his Facebook account and posted racist and homophobic comments under his name.…

Hypervisor wars and nullifying EVO:RAIL Comment Rumours are circulating about a hypervisor built by Nutanix, and Nutanix open-sourcing its software; two intriguing moves. Why would Nutanix make these moves as VMware ratchets up its attack on hyper-converged vendors with EVO:RAIL?…

Apps will also run on Linux. They're not ignoring you Google has released a tool that runs Android apps on Windows, OS X, and Linux computers via its Chrome browser.…

Vids, Internet of Things driving the agenda Updated British mobile phone coverage will lag further behind the rest of Europe this year: now the French are auctioning off valuable spectrum space, at 700MHz, to high-speed mobile networks.…

Israeli firm buys its own solution to Bring-Your-Own-Device headaches Check Point is buying Lacoon Mobile Security, in a deal that expands the security software firm beyond its core firewall and IDS market while pushing it further into mobile. Terms of the deal, announced Thursday, were undisclosed.…