An elite group of black Carnaby’s cockatoos has been fitted with satellite tracking devices in an Australian first bird data collection measure. The six rehabilitated Carnaby’s cockatoos were released at Perry Lakes in Perth, their natural habitat, and will be monitored to examine the dispersal and movement patterns of the six birds. Black cockatoo numbers Read more

Kodak’s hopes to parlay its patent portfolio into a get-out-of-Chapter-11 card have been dealt a blow, with a ruling that Apple and RIM haven’t infringed its digital image preview patents. The patents have been subject of lawsuits in both directions: Apple has accused the moribund icon of “ransacking” its IP to secure the patents in Read more

The NSW government has awarded grants to seven mobile consortiums under the Collaborative Solutions program for Mobile Government. The government will provide around AUD$1 million to help the consortiums develop new mobile solutions for the public sector after a competitive pitch. The solutions will be trialled with NSW Trade Investment, which spans government activities from Read more

Windows XP update fails, asks for repeated .NET patch installs Users stuck in a loop as patches install, then ask to do it all again By Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor • Get more from this author Posted in Software, 23rd May 2012 00:00 GMT Register today: How CERN automates software builds with Electric Cloud Microsoft’s latest Read more

The Canary Islands of La Palma and Tenerife have been briefly connected by a quantum teleportation system that sets a new distance record for the spooky communications technique. In an angle that will get Trekkie bloggers reaching for the “beam me up” metaphors, the researchers, from Austria, Germany, Canada and Norway, hope that quantum teleportation Read more

The US stock market regulator has charged an ex-Yahoo! exec and a pal with insider trading after the pair discussed a search engine partnership between Yahoo! and Microsoft. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said Robert Kwok, who was Yahoo!’s senior director of business management, breached his duty to the company when he told Reema Read more

WHMCS, which provides billing and customer support tech to many web hosts, was comprehensively hacked on Monday and remains offline. Hackers tricked WHMCS’s own hosting firm into handing over admin credentials to its servers. The group that carried out the hack, UGNazi, subsequently extracted the billing company’s database before deleting files, essentially trashing the server Read more

Scammers are attempting to trick prospective marks into opening malware via spam messages falsely warning that their Facebook account is in the process of being closed. The dodgy email poses as supposed account cancellation confirmation messages that point to a third-party application running on the Facebook platform. The upshot of this is that even though Read more

Anonymous-affiliated hackers dropped a 1.7GB torrent of data allegedly onto file-sharing networks on Monday after hacking into the US Bureau of Justice Statistics. The leaked files purportedly include “internal emails” as as well as other files supposedly culled from other compromised databases at the BJS, the US government agency that collates statistics on crimes in Read more

Social media posts which lure readers with the promise of illegal, amoral or forbidden products and services may become a cold war cyber weapon, according to Kaspersky Labs CEO Eugene Kaspersky. Speaking to The Register in Sydney yesterday Kaspersky said the usual suspects – Duqu, Stuxnet, whatever happened in Estonia and the regular data deletions Read more