Latest posts RSS

The European internet's oddest places

Many countries consider internet access numbers to be a good measure of how up-to-date their citizens and industry are, with higher penetration rates signalling good things. Dig down into the figures, though, and you can find some peculiar numbers that may or may not say more about their geography than plain old economics .

Thanks to Internet World Stats, here are some figures from 2011 that cast a slightly... Read more

Happy Birthday, Sinclair QL - 28 years today

It was a time before the GUI, when computers were micros, when memory was measured in kilobytes and storage strategy meant choosing whether to buy a second five and a quarter inch floppy drive. It was eleven days before the launch of the Apple Macintosh. It was 12 January, 1984: the day of the Sinclair QL.

For those who weren't born then, the QL was the quintessence of Sinclair Research — home of the ZX... Read more

ZDNet's guide to beating New Year tech torpor

January. Not so much a month as 31 days of post-party comedown, where every pleasure is circumscribed by resolution and, let's be frank, those long, empty, fiscally-fraught acres of calendar between now and payday.

There is one self-indulgence that is neither immoral, illegal or fattening: reading. So here are three excellent ways to economically entertain and inform yourself, taking you away from these leaden... Read more

Rooting Android Part 3: A taste of despair, and of victory

ERR indeed.

The phone had gone to its own Valhalla. I restarted it: a yellow exclamation mark and the message "Firmware upgrade encountered an issue. Please select recovery mode in Kies & try again." was all it would show.

Now, Kies is the phone management software that Samsung suggests you use to keep your phone up to date, synced and with your media in order. I'd installed and run it earlier, to make sure... Read more

Rooting Android Part 2: Breaking the Norse code

Having decided to take control of my Samsung Galaxy S II by installing new system software, I needed to know two things: what and how. Start by asking Google about "rooting Samsung Galaxy S2" — it doesn't really matter what the topic is these days, the basic skill you need in making a good start is framing the right Google query. All those years understanding operating system theory, not so useful.

It was a... Read more

Rooting Android Part 1: Samsung Galaxy S II on the block

The festive break presents the technically inclined with challenge and opportunity. The challenge is that petty annoyances with wayward IT can seem much more significant during those long winter days where normal work is absent. The opportunity is to use that free time to do something about them. The combination can be seductive - and dangerous.

So it was with my new Samsung Galaxy S II phone, my first non-HTC... Read more

Cameron's conference Wi-Fi code calamity

OK, it's not much of a calamity. But when you want to be seen as leading a government intent on making the internet a safer place, heading up global cybersecurity and locking down the nation's digital jewels, it's a bit bad to be the agent of — oh, I don't know — encouraging attacks on VIP laptops.

So it's a bit of a shame that David Cameron has just appeared live on national TV from a conference in... Read more

ZDNet UK hits Exeter University - come along!

Jack Clark, the man who lives on data the way plants live on sunlight, and myself are at Exeter University today. We'll be talking to all sorts of people about all sorts of research during the day and at 5pm, we're chairing a round table with guests from IBM, Rackspace and others on the subject of what it's like to have a career in IT.

If you're around, drop by - there may be a little something for some lucky... Read more

Open source's disdain for enterprise

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. It's a simple lesson, one learned by most of us by the time we're twenty (OK, fifty). But it's lost on some very high profile open source efforts, which seem increasingly to think that the workers of the world don't deserve the benefits of decent software. If something can be changed, it should — and that's a fatal approach for enterprise IT.

It's not that... Read more

Nvidia's Icera deal hides bleak outlook for EU wireless

You'll have heard of Nvidia, the graphics and mobile chip maker. Until today, you won't have heard of Icera, which hails from Bristol and makes data chips for mobiles.

So when the former buys the latter, it's Nvidia's story: rightly so, as it fits the fashionable narrative that there's a shakedown in portable tech.

With hot sales but painfully thin margins, every last cent is being squeezed from the supply... Read more

Community highlights

Jake Rayson

Ubuntu HUD Intenterface? Sublime already there!

Blog Post Mark Shuttleworth's recent post about the planned Ubuntu Heads Up Display has...

27 January, 2012 by Jake Rayson
Jack Schofield

Samsung tops world smartphone table, says iSuppli

Blog Post In 2011, Samsung became the world's largest manufacturer of smartphones, when...

27 January, 2012 by Jack Schofield
Alan Priestley

Will 2012 be the year of the cloud?

Blog Post I do believe 2012 is going to be an exciting year for cloud computing, and...

27 January, 2012 by Alan Priestley
Simon Bisson and Mary Branscombe

'Do you trust Google?' is the wrong question

Blog Post Don't mind Google knowing your real name, or putting your photo against the...

26 January, 2012 by Simon Bisson and Mary Branscombe

ZDNet UK Live

apexwm

"They have neglected to publicize a post-mortem..." I am sure that more granular details of the attack will eventually come out, if they are not...

7 hours ago by apexwm on Windows security breaches on the rise
Moley

At the end of the day, so to speak, one of the biggest problems is the unintended consequences, something we are all familiar with these days. We...

9 hours ago by Moley on UK signs ACTA as activists urge resistance
Simon Bisson and Mary Branscombe

Malware stats are subject to the law of large numbers; the huge market share of Windows makes it the platform to attack. If we ever see the year of...

10 hours ago by Simon Bisson and Mary Branscombe on Windows security breaches on the rise
Simon Bisson and Mary Branscombe

Jack - not just the advertising but the Web tools, like Google Analytics, which is how Google can associate you searching for say 'how do I declare...

10 hours ago by Simon Bisson and Mary Branscombe on 'Do you trust Google?' is the wrong question
Moley

Time that the case just went away, just like the Phorm case reported on ZDNet today. Reading the article, I don't see a strictly legal case to...

10 hours ago by Moley on Judge lights fire under McKinnon proceedings
Jack Schofield

@apexwm I was simply pointing out the naivety of your statement that "if they don't want their information stored at Google, then they shouldn't...

11 hours ago by Jack Schofield on 'Do you trust Google?' is the wrong question
honeymonster

kernel.org and linuxfoundation.org are run by the people *most* knowledgeable about Linux and security. You do not find anyone anywhere who knows...

11 hours ago by honeymonster on Windows security breaches on the rise
Tim Syass

Is this the beginning of the end to freedom of speech???

14 hours ago by Tim Syass via Facebook on UK signs ACTA as activists urge resistance
chris haddad

Jack, what is your definition of " a partial PaaS"? I haven't heard the term partial PaaS or full PaaS before. Sounds a bit like hedging on...

15 hours ago by chris haddad on Amazon cuts off stack at the PaaS
JonathanJ

Yes, stricly speaking, McKinnon is wanted for 'stealing' blank passwords (an impossibility if ever there was one, not to mention that passwords...

15 hours ago by JonathanJ on Judge lights fire under McKinnon proceedings
Claire Simmons

Crucially, without the damage, McKinnon's actions are not an extraditable offence. Even his admissions to the non-extraditable Summary Offence are...

15 hours ago by Claire Simmons via Facebook on Judge lights fire under McKinnon proceedings
manek

Interestingly, at a recent conference held by analyst STL Partners, security was no longer top of the list of concerns. Instead, it was IT jobs...

15 hours ago by manek on Will 2012 be the year of the cloud?
apexwm

Jack : I am not saying I agree with Google excessively tracking users. But, I think social networks (i.e. Facebook, Google+) are doing much worse...

18 hours ago by apexwm on 'Do you trust Google?' is the wrong question
Jack Schofield

@apexwm Google puts a long-life cookie on your hard drive, and a Wall Street Journal article found it tracked you more than anybody else because...

18 hours ago by Jack Schofield on 'Do you trust Google?' is the wrong question
apexwm

servermanagement : Agreed. I highly recommend using a non-Internet Explorer browser, if you are using Windows, like Firefox or Chrome. And in...

18 hours ago by apexwm on Windows security breaches on the rise
natalief

Ironically I have just re-read / re-listened-to Cory Doctorow's "Scroogled" which just shows that, thus far, Google is not that Evil at all.

19 hours ago by natalief on 'Do you trust Google?' is the wrong question
Jack Schofield

@toast171 You're asking for *facts* about Windows on a blog called "The open source revolution"? ;-)

19 hours ago by Jack Schofield on Windows security breaches on the rise
apexwm

Google and any of these services aren't going to know your name and personal data, other than your IP address, client, etc. that is obtainable...

19 hours ago by apexwm on 'Do you trust Google?' is the wrong question
toast171

Do you have statistics on thenumber of incidents on Windows rising at the end of 2011, or is it just an assertion?

19 hours ago by toast171 on Windows security breaches on the rise
Jack Clark

@James Watters Thanks for pointing that out. Amazon has developed significant PaaS capabilities since Vogels first said that a little under a year...

22 hours ago by Jack Clark on Amazon cuts off stack at the PaaS