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Wireless charging was a key feature of Samsung’s flagship Android blower when it was announced, but the replacement back plate it needs isn’t on the shelves yet, so one brave soul has hacked a Palm Touchstone charger into the S3 case. Not that the hack uses the Samsung/Qualcomm-backed “Alliance for Wireless Power” standard, that’s not Read more

NetApp overtook IBM in IDC’s latest quarterly storage tracker, reversing several quarters of market share decline In the first calendar 2012 quarter IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker reports global external disk storage systems factory revenues rose 7.1 per cent year-over-year growth to almost $6bn. EMC remains top dog with $1.733bn sales, 29 per Read more

Stanley’s healthcare division has scooped up Wi-Fi tracking leader AeroScout, with a view to pushing the technology into hospitals – for use where RFID isn’t good enough. Stanley Healthcare will spend the next year adding AeroScout’s Wi-Fi based real-time location system to its product portfolio, as well as integrating the systems with its own management Read more

The US Navy has signed off on a $27,883,883 contract from military contractor Raytheon to install Linux ground control software for its fleet of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) drones. The contract covers the Naval Air Station at Patuxent River in Maryland, which has already spent $5,175,075 beginning to install Linux systems. The no-bid contract Read more

Product Round-up It wasn’t that long ago that it would’ve been a struggle to put together a list of ten consumer SSDs. Now it’s case of asking: only ten? Indeed, the rise of flash based storage in the last 18 months or so has been truly astounding. Increased competition and cheaper NAND prices have combined Read more

HP’s Store Once Catalyst and B6200 hardware offers the “least capable” deduplication in the industry. That’s according to Sepaton, which should know as HP resells its deduplicating array. The Sepaton product in question is the ES2 S2100 8-node clustered globally deduplicating array – resold by HP – and we asked Sepaton for its views on Read more

Comment The idea of taxing internet traffic has got the twitterverse into a tizzy. Apparently socialists monsters want pay for their carriage, and the UN has cooked up a secret plan to get the money. Having failed to find evidence that blue-helmeted geeks are poised to invade cyberspace, the US internet community is now up Read more

Scientists in the US have developed a novel system for detecting landmines by training rats equipped with GPS and wireless rucksacks to sniff out explosives and map them for destruction. A team of boffins at Bucknell University has trained the Rattus recruits to identify the chemicals that seep into the ground from land mines, and Read more

There’s good news for folks worried that atmospheric CO2 levels in the Arctic have passed 400ppm for the first time: a vast CO2-sucking phytoplankton bloom has been discovered beneath Arctic ice – and it may thank global warming for its presence. “This wasn’t just any phytoplankton bloom,” Stanford University marine scientist Kevin Arrigo told The Read more

Intel is pitching a set-top box to media companies that can recognize the viewer in order to pitch more-targeted advertising. Luckily, it’s reportedly running into problems. Multiple sources told Reuters that Intel is developing the hardware and software to allow facial recognition of the viewer, including their age and gender. Chipzilla is pitching media networks Read more