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Planetary scientists across the US will bring attention to NASA budget cuts on Saturday by mockingly hosting their own fundraising event: the National Planetary Exploration Car Wash Bake Sale. “Join us and make Congress and the American public aware of the planetary cuts and the damage they are doing!” the organizers exhort on their website. Read more

LinkedIn has turned to the FBI for help after 6.5 million of its users’ passwords were dumped online by hackers. The business network said “a small subset” of the hashed data had been deduced and revealed, but the rest is “hard to decode”. Security biz Sophos estimated that as much as 60 per cent of Read more

CyCon 2012 Germany has confirmed that its military maintains an operational cyberwarfare unit with offensive capabilities. The admission, which appeared in parliamentary documents published on Tuesday, gave no details of the size of the unit much less any operations that it might have run. However documents delivered to the German federal defence committee did reveal Read more

It was thought that it would take an atomic bomb to produce enough power to generate an X-ray laser, but a team of boffins have fired one from a table-top box of tricks. X-ray lasers need astonishing amounts of power and huge equipment to create extremely short-lived yet coherent beams with a wavelength in the Read more

Buffalo Technology launched the world’s first portable Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 dual-interface drive this week at Computex. The bus-powered MiniStation Thunderbolt/USB Portable Hard Drive comes in both 500GB and 1TB versions and features the lightening-quick connection ports of both USB 3.0 – said to handle speeds of up to 5Gbps – as well as the Read more

Marvell’s latest Avastar chipset and TI’s next-generation silicon will stream video to a TV, projector or similar over Wi-Fi Direct while maintaining a separate wireless network connection. But why? So you can ensure what’s being shown on your touchscreen tablet can be seen on the family telly or lecture hall wall, provided you’re not enjoying Read more

Barnes Noble has lodged a complaint over the ebook settlement proposed by the Department of Justice, claiming that it will be bad news for booksellers and the American public. The bookseller, which has been competing in the market with its Nook ereader, said that the DoJ’s antitrust case against Apple and five publishing houses over Read more

Star Trek hero George Takei unleashed such a wave of interest after posting a link on his Facebook page – to a website which was selling a ‘Takei T-shirt’ – that the site’s ISP assumed that the traffic was a DDoS attack and took the site down for several hours. The Star Trek star posted Read more

Last.fm users are the latest internet community to get the “change your password” message as the music streaming site investigates a “leak of some user passwords”. However, unlike LinkedIn or eHarmony, Last.fm has jumped on the suspicion that something’s wrong, rather than waiting for user passwords to appear on the Internet. In this post, the Read more

A British company who offered “iPhone 5s” to punters has been slapped with a £10,000 fine by regulator PhonePayPlus, which ruled that the adverts for the non-existent phone were misleading. According to the judgment published today, the Bumbalee service run by Mobile Minded BV used “prizes” such as the iPhone 5 to lure punters into Read more