Throwies occupy a special place in hardware culture — a coin cell battery, LED, and a magnet that can be thrown into an inaccessible place and stick there as a little beacon of colored light. Many of us will fondly remember this as a first project. Alas, time marches inevitably on, and launching cheerful lights no longer teaches me new skills. With a nod to those simpler times, I’ve been working on the unusual idea of building a fully functional server that can be left in remote places and remain functional, like a throwie (please don’t actually throw it). It’s …read more

The UK's comms watchdog claims to have slapped a £13.3m penalty on EE and Virgin Media for fleecing customers who wanted to exit their broadband or mobile phone contracts before they were due to expire.

Ofcom today claimed both providers had ignored its customer protection rules that state agreements with consumers must make any charges "due on termination of contract... clear and accurate". The regs also indicate that switching to a rival must not be costly.

"EE and Virgin Media broke our rules by overcharging people who ended their contracts early. Those people were left out of pocket, and the

Says company that sells switching services

Millions of Britons unwilling to be parted from their urban broadband and not-too-shabby mobile phone reception are shunning rural living, according to a survey.

Diary of a not-spot: Vulture hack vows, I will never pay BT again!

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Just to really add insult to injury for the Great British Countryside and all who live in it, city dwellers who abandoned the rat race are apparently regretting their move precisely because of crap web

America's broadband and telly regulator, the FCC, today approved a vast expansion in satellite networks around Earth.

This effectively gives the green light to the launch of tens of thousands of mini-satellites that will operate in low orbit and mesh together to form next-generation communications networks.

The federal regulator also formally approved connecting US equipment to Europe's Galileo GPS system, and launched a review of rules and policies covering space debris.

Among the recipients of the expansion is SpaceX and its Starlink program, which plans to blanket the globe with 12,000 satellites and offer internet access to rural areas that

HPE Aruba today released a line of wireless hotspots supporting next year's 802.11ax/Wi-Fi 6 standard – and then immediately sullied them by applying the AI marketing buzzword.

The Aruba 510 access points, along with "complementary access switches", support the long-in-the-pipeline Wi-Fi 6 standard.

That standard was previously known as 802.11ax until someone at the Wi-Fi Alliance finally realised that Average Joe hasn't got a hope of following the IEEE's arcane convolutions.

We are told that the 510 series APs are the first to be certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance for the WPA3 wireless security protocol , as well as the