Deakin University scientists have developed a new digital watermarking method which they claim could potentially stamp out music piracy. [ + ]

Apple and IBM, once bitter rivals, have surprised the tech world with an agreement to enter a major enterprise mobility partnership. [ + ]

IBM will spend $3.2bn to research sub-7-nanometre transistors, post-silicon chips, cognitive and quantum computing and other ways to keep Moore's Law going while transforming how computers are designed. [ + ]

Microsoft will discontinue 'mainstream support' for Windows 7 in January next year, and will provide the much leaner 'extended support' until 2020. [ + ]

Research shows one in five enterprises have experienced an advanced persistent threat (APT) attack, but only one in three could determine the source. [ + ]

Mandatory retention of telecom records will reportedly not be among the national security reforms the Attorney-General's office plans to propose this week. [ + ]

After two straight years of quarterly declines, global PC sales increased a marginal 0.1% during the second quarter, Gartner estimates. [ + ]

A US Department of Homeland Security-funded research institute is working with the Secure Decisions company to use visualisation tools to produce better security data analysis. [ + ]

A quarter of Australian workers expect to be made redundant due to advances in technology, and a majority view temporary work as a good stepping stone to a full-time job, a survey shows. [ + ]

A design for a chip that uses wireless transmission to send data between cores could improve energy efficiency at data farms by up to 20%, while also improving processing speed. [ + ]

Big data will drive data centre growth in Australia, with more than 75% of Australian organisations expecting to increase spending on data centre facilities within the year. [ + ]

The ancient human instinct not to throw away anything useful is leading to VM sprawl - the rise of zombie virtual machines that refuse to die. [ + ]

The communications ministry and NICTA have launched the National Map Open Data initiative, a single map that contains a variety of government geospatial data. [ + ]

Nudgee College in Brisbane recently made a massive change to its academic IT system, replacing ageing infrastructure such as servers and a fleet of college-owned notebooks. [ + ]

NBN Co has officially pushed the launch date for its fibre-to-the-basement (FTTB) product from October this year to early 2015, but the company is "uncommitted" to the new date. [ + ]