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Pic NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity snapped a dramatic photo of itself roaming around the planet’s Endeavour Crater today. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ The image caught the clear shadow of the hardworking robot, which to our wise eyes on the Vulture space desk looks a bit like the cute movie character WALL-E. The Register is Read more

Google is to indirectly equip 102 UK schools with Raspberry Pi devices. The ZX81 de nos jours – though Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, who announced the scheme last night, likened the Pi to the more education-centric, posher BBC Micro – will come to schools through UK charity Teach First. Google and Teach First will Read more

Now that Facebook is being scrutinised by its new-found shareholders, it really needs people to start clicking on its ads. That’s a fact shamelessly highlighted by Mark Zuckerberg’s right-hand woman, chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, who was speaking to business students at Harvard University this morning. According to Reuters, she finished off her speech by Read more

Unite and the Public Services Commercial (PCS) unions will form a tag team to “use every means possible” to safeguard the jobs of 1,600 HP UK employees under risk of redundancy. The tech monster revealed late last night that it is hitting the eject button for 27,000 workers worldwide – including Autonomy founder Mike Lynch Read more

The UK government has launched the second version of G-Cloud, its tech shopping catalogue for the public sector, with reworked conditions to entice suppliers. Among the changes, the length of some IT contracts up for grabs has been doubled to 24 months under “exceptional” circumstances. There’d been some concern from civil servants and suppliers that Read more

Yahoo! today released its Axis extension for Chrome – and accidentally leaked its private security key that could allow anyone to create malicious plugins masquerading as official Yahoo! software. Australian entrepreneur Nik Cubrilovic, who last year garnered notice for identifying Facebook’s tracking cookies, revealed the certificate blunder on his blog, and said users should not Read more

Google has successfully defended Android against Oracle’s patent infringement claim, leaving whether its API breaches copyright as the only question still in play between the two companies. The 10-person San Francisco jury has found that neither of the two patents that were the grounds for Oracle’s suit were infringed. As a result, Oracle won’t be Read more

Telstra has taken the unusual – in Australia – step of proactively announcing that a service has been compromised. The carrier has announced that it’s reset the passwords of 35,000 users of its GameArena and Games Shop services, stating that “the sites, operated by a third party company, were victims of a hacking attack.” The Read more

Computers aren’t yet good at making complex, ad-hoc decisions from visual inputs. However, the discovery at Melbourne’s RMIT that bees’ brains are big enough to do so could set the direction for future computer vision research. According to RMIT Associate Professor Adrian Dyer, of RMIT’s school of media and communication, the Australian-French project demonstrated that Read more

Researchers from NASA and Korea’s National Nanofab Center have cooked up nanoscale vacuum tubes, potentially bringing some of the earliest digital devices back into the mainstream of technology. As detailed in a new paper from Applied Physics Letters, the tiny tubes were manufactured using the same processes applied to silicon semiconductors. An important tweak sees Read more