Hundreds of card swipers used by retail stores across Europe are believed to have been tampered by organized crime syndicates in China and Pakistan, according to US National Counterintelligence Executive Joel Brenner.…

It seems that tech's billionaires are sharing the privations of ordinary citizens, whose savings are vanishing and pensions becoming worthless as stock markets tumble.…

For digital music vendors, protecting files with digital rights management (DRM) is like a lobster trap. It's easy enough to enter into, but getting back out is another matter entirely.…

Google's Gmail service suffers from security flaws that make it trivial for attackers to create authentic-looking spoof pages that steal users' login credentials, a security expert has demonstrated. Google Calendar and other sensitive Google services are susceptible to similar tampering.…

Debian project leader Steve McIntyre has dismissed claims that the next stable version of Debian – codename Lenny – could be delayed until June 2009. Based on the number of outstanding release-critical bugs and the time it has taken to fix them on previous releases, Debian developer Bastian Venthur estimated it will take a further eight or nine months to bring Lenny up to release quality.…

Volunteer mountain-rescue staff in Scotland are being asked to write to the UK regulator Ofcom to complain about increased spectrum prices that could drive them out of the life-saving business.…

Imation has issued preliminary third quarter figures badly affected by the financial market turmoil in September.…

Microsoft has once again poured cold water over the latest rumour that it’ll launch a Blu-ray Disc drive add-on for the Xbox 360.…

In a shameless effort to show that someone in the financial services industry is still investing in technology - and relatively exotic new blade server technology at that - IBM has announced that brokerage house Merrill Lynch, soon to be part of the Bank of America behemoth after running into BoA's welcoming arms in mid-September.…

Reg Reader Workshop One criticism levelled at Agile methodologies for software development is that of scale. “It’s all very well for very small projects,” we have been told, “but for anything above 10 people, you can forget it.” So, how true is this?…

OpenOffice.org is throwing a launch party in Paris on 13 October to mark the eighth anniversary of the popular open source office software suite and announce – it hopes – the release of version 3.0.…

Payments made to PayPal's top-up card on Wednesday of this week have still not appeared on account balances, and the company is unable to tell angry customers when the problem will be fixed.…

As Europe braces itself for mobile telephony without termination rates, Verizon is to start charging companies for delivering messages to its customers, while continuing to charge those customers for receiving them.…

Virgin Media believes it is being shafted by comparison sites offering ISP speed checks, and has called on them to improve their techniques ahead of the launch of its 50Mbit/s upgrade.…

Passengers are being questioned over whether they were using electronic equipment just before their Qantas A330-300 plunged out-of-control over Western Australia.…

An Oz radio news outfit last Sunday failed to broadcast its 4pm bulletin because the female newsreader was glued to Facebook, The Australian reports.…

Mobile phone connections over 3G are like so yesterday. HTC obviously knows this and so has developed what could well be the world’s first WiMax-capable phone.…

It's come to our attention that a trailer for Channel 4's Dispatches - which will next week ask "if the sun is setting" on British Airways - features some rather fetching Playmobil scenes set inside Heathrow's acclaimed Terminal 5.…

Microsoft has desperately turned to Simon Cowell to help sprinkle some X Factor dust on Windows Vista, giving the already has-been OS a last shot at stardom.…

As if you haven't got enough languages already, Microsoft is about to give you one more: M, part of its Oslo development and service-oriented strategy.…

Cash-strapped TV broadcaster Channel 4 has confirmed it will completely withdraw from the eponymous DAB radio consortium, Digital 4. The move will save £10m, executives said today.…

Software issues affecting the BlackBerry Bold appear to have spurred Orange to suspend all UK sales of the 3G handset.…

Reports are emerging that the US Justice Department is working on a hand-held version of existing microwave cannons intended for riot or crowd control. The portable raygun could also have applications as a scanner or detector system, apart from being a weapon; and a working prototype has already been built.…

The latest graphics cards have been used to break Wi-Fi encryption far quicker than was previously possible. Some security consultants are already suggesting the development blows Wi-Fi security out of the water and that corporations ought to apply tighter VPN controls, or abandon wireless networks altogether, in response.…

Startup AutoVirt is going to introduce a Windows file share virtualisation product to drive up disk utilisation and ease file storage consolidation. It's like an IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) for files.…

Spare a kinky kind thought for one Wicked Wanda this Friday - the Canadian sex shop owner has been robbed of vibrators to the tune of $2,000.…

Review Asus' Eee marque may be associated with laptops, but it's been applied to desktops too, specifically the Eee Box, a slimline unit designed to stay in one place.…

An aggressive newcomer is muscling in on everyone's favourite cattleprod-enforcement firm, Taser International. Stinger Systems says its "advanced electro sparc-pulsed" zap weaponry is much safer for the victim miscreant, and is offering American police forces a cheap "trade in your Taser" deal.…

Mandriva has released the latest version of its desktop Linux distribution, which comes loaded with new KDE, Gnome, Firefox and OpenOffice tools.…

Sun's share price has fallen so low it is about the same as before last year's reverse stock split. So is Sun turning into another Unisys?…

Here's top tip for those of you who like to have the odd firearm around the house: Don't put live rounds wrapped in newspaper in your cast iron stove and then throw a match in.…

ISPs have been worried to learn that BT's ongoing multibillion pound "21CN" network upgrade won't offer native support for IPv6, the networking protocol that it's planned will form the bedrock of a rapidly expanding 21st century internet.…

One of the longest-sought, most keenly anticipated high-tech weapons of the past century - namely, the dreaded circuitry-frying electromagnetic pulse bomb - seems to have had its schedule moved forward.…

First Acer, now Lenovo. The ThinkPad company has rolled out a laptop with WiMax on board to cater for wireless broadband buffs in Baltimore.…

The Health Protection Agency is warning that low-energy light bulbs could give enough ultraviolet radiation to cause damage to your skin.…

Opera has patched a brace of critical vulnerabilities with the release of the latest version of its web browser.…

FoTW It's a well-known fact that flames are like number 13 buses - you wait ages for one and then a whole load turn up and once.…

Analysis Symantec, traditionally one of the more conservative firms in the security market, is attempting to pull off a high-wire balancing act with its surprise $695m acquisition of security software-as-a-service pioneer MessageLabs. The firm is betting that increased revenues in the hottest segment of the security market will justify a high (especially for the current economic climate) acquisition price.…

The European Commission has again written to the government for an explanation of UK authorities' response to BT's allegedly illegal secret trials of Phorm's ISP adware system.…

US weaponry and aerospace giant Alliant Techsystems (ATK) - makers of rockets to NASA, among other things - are pleased to announce their latest gizmo: the Palletised Autonomous Weapons System (PAWS).…

The Ministry of Defence and contractor EDS are frantically checking the bins this morning for a missing hard drive containing records of 100,000 servicemen and women and their families.…

Plasmon's US operation is preparing for lift-off as an independent company whilst Plasmon Ltd's shareholders, creditors and staff try to see if any crumbs will fall their way from the administrators' table.…

It's official: Apple is updating its MacBook laptop line next week - the Mac maker has mailed out invites to an event at which "the spotlight turns to notebooks".…

Whether you use a Mac or a PC, be prepared to install a bumper crop of security patches on your machine in the near future.…

Like dozens of other communities across America, the tiny town of Monticello, Minnesota wants to build a fiber-optic broadband network. In September of last year, its citizens approved the project via referendum, with 74 per cent of voters giving the nod. But thirteen months later, its fiberlicious dream is still on hold, thanks to a lawsuit from the incumbent phone company.…

Micron Technology, the largest memory maker in the US, plans to lay off 15 per cent of its workforce and halt production of NAND flash chips at its Boise, Idaho headquarters.…

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Microsoft is taking steps to make sure it's not left out of pocket as banking customers seek bankruptcy protection against their suppliers.…

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A 22-year-old Romanian national has admitted he participated in a US-based phishing operation that raked in some $700,000 over a three-year period.…