Geek

250,000 signatures for fair treatment of iWorkers

Breakfast at Apple retail outlets in Washington, DC, New York, San Francisco, London, Sydney, and Bangalore will come with a side order of protest on Thursday morning, as “concerned Apple customers” will be dropping off 250,000-signature petitions calling out Apple on supplier working practices.…

CAMDASS augmented reality for astronaut patch-up

The European Space Agency is showing off an augmented-reality kit which it says will ultimately pave the way for diagnosis and even surgery for astronauts.…

Telcos 'need clarity'

Telstra CEO David Thodey has told journalists and analysts that the telecommunications industry “needs clarity” following the Federal Court decision which clearly and simply said “Optus TV Now is legal”.…

Rolls out that fibre for New Zealand

Huawei has secured another key government win in New Zealand to provide fibre services to the Christchurch UFB with Enable Services Limited.…

Turnbull doesn't like it, again

NBN Co has awarded Space Systems/Loral an $AU620 million contract to build, deliver and deploy two next-generation Ka-band satellites to cover regional Australia.…

Raises dividend, remains cautious

Networking - and some would say data center bellwether - Cisco Systems turned in a better-than-expected fiscal Q2 ended in January, with revenues up 10.8 per cent to $11.53bn and net income up a very good 43.5 per cent to $2.18bn.…

For the geek who has everything

iRobot has confirmed it’s ready to start manufacture and sale of its Warrior 710 robot early this year.…

Salesforce.com has made a series of changes to its support services that include the removal of certain features from the Standard tier, but which the company says overall will provide a better experience for customers.

Google today patched 20 vulnerabilities in the desktop edition of Chrome and added new anti-malware download warnings to version 17. The company called out a pair of new features in Chrome 17, including the expansion of anti-malware download warnings and pre-rendering of pages suggested by the address/search bar's auto-complete function.

Berners-Lee warns of disaster for internet

Eolas Technologies has begun its trial against Adobe over two patents that, it claims, gives it the rights to embedded browser applications and plug-in and AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) web development techniques.…

Spammers are impersonating well-known Android software developers in order to distribute rogue apps through the official Android Market. Security researchers from antivirus firm Trend Micro have identified a developer named Rovio MobiIe Ltd. in the Android Market, which had a significant number of rogue applications in its portfolio.

Bedding down BAE Systems prototype

The US Navy’s Office of Naval Research is preparing to test a prototype railgun delivered by BAE Systems under a $US21 million contract signed in 2010.…

When a CPU just isn't fast enough

Solarflare, a maker of 10 Gigabit Ethernet server adapter cards for performance-obsessed companies like stock exchanges, hedge funds, and supercomputer centers, is turning its network interface cards into servers, more or less.…

Comms Alliance lays down the law

Australian carriers, voice services and ISPs will be forced to take their obligations to the rights of consumers seriously under a new revised consumer code from industry group, the Communications Alliance.…

We meant to copy your address book but we didn’t think you’d mind

After sparking an outcry – and arguably putting itself on the wrong side of privacy laws outside America – ex-Facebooker and now CEO of Path, Dave Morin, has blogged an apology.…

Femtocell developer Airvana is charging Ericsson with breaching their contract over femtocell technology, in a lawsuit (PDF) filed in the Supreme Court of the State of New York. Femtocells like those Airvana developed extend capacity and coverage of mobile networks, which are under increasing strain. The market for such technologies has grown rapidly over the past few years as the use of mobile phones for both voice and data access has also grown.

Rumour mill spits out Tosh as buyer

We are hearing that Toshiba is buying Western Digital's "excess" 3.5-inch disk drive business, clearing the way to the completion of the WD's acquisition of Hitachi GST .…

B.Y.O. Bottom, should you desire a kiss

Sir Paul McCartney, late of Wings, will celebrate the release of his latest album with a live concert streamed over Apple's iTunes this Thursday at 7pm, Pacific Time.…

Google plans to remove online certificate revocation checks from future versions of Chrome, because it considers the process inefficient and slow. Browsers currently check if a website's SSL certificate has been revoked by its issuing Certificate Authority (CA) when trying to establish an HTTPS connection. These checks are done by querying CA-operated servers through a special protocol known as OCSP (Online Certificate Status Protocol).

Plus, adopt a needy cloud

Podcast Last week, Greg Knieriemen turned the heat up on Marc Farley, StorageIO's Greg Schulz and the legendary StorageZilla.…