| | |  | As streets go, Willow Road is as nondescript as you get in this part of California. Traffic lights, trees and strip malls, a street off the 101 Highway that cuts through San Francisco, into the heart of Silicon Valley and on south to Los Angeles, writes Matthew Hall. | | Top stories JEWEL TOPSFIELD | Many schools will ask students to bring their own smartphones, tablets and laptops from home as a federal government program which gave every student in years 9 to 12 access to a computer expires at the end of this month. | NICKY PHILLIPS | Australian engineers have designed a satellite system that can map the water content of soil across the entire continent every three days. | James Dominguez | Sony and Microsoft are set to battle it out with their next-generation game consoles. | SARAH WHYTE | Consumer group steps in as three-year-old playing free app game siphons mother's bank account. | Stuart Corner 2:33pm | The Australian government's national cloud computing strategy, made public on May 29, has been criticised by some for failing to mandate a "cloud first" approach to IT procurement by government agencies, yet applauded by others. | Adam Turner 12:18pm | Optus and Vodafone customers need not apply when it comes to Twitter's two-factor authentication. | Ben Schneiders and Clay Lucas | Australians are becoming slaves to their iPhones, indiscriminately checking them or their tablets for work emails at weekends, during leisure time and on holidays, a new study has found. | Irene Klotz 11:52am | A privately owned asteroid mining firm, backed in part by Google's founders, has launched a crowd-funding project to gauge public interest in a small space telescope that could serve as a backdrop for personal photographs, officials said. | William D. Cohan | David Karp's ability to cope with corporate life will be put to the test now that Yahoo! is calling the shots. | Jim Finkle and Jennifer Saba 9:54am | LinkedIn has improved the security of the social networking site for professionals, about a week after Twitter introduced similar tools following a surge in high-profile attacks on its users. | NSW train commuters will be offered a range of sweeteners to encourage them to use the state's new electronic transport ticketing system. | NICK MILLER | Should robots be allowed to take a human life, without direct supervision or command? Science fiction met reality at the United Nations in Geneva, where this question was debated at a meeting of the Human Rights Council. | ILYA GRIDNEFF | A virtual currency loved by geeks is fast becoming the currency for crooks. | IMAGING | This web-based photo editor is an extraordinary piece of free software. | Craig Butt | Welcome to GovHack, a nation-wide carnival of innovation that drew people to work with public government data. | Cynthia Karena | The information you post on social media isn't just for your friends, no matter how strict your privacy settings. | SIGHT AND SOUND | Rod Easdown turns the volume up and reviews a trio of mini-systems. | Adam Turner | Australian broadcasters embrace Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV. | The internet will make some English misspellings acceptable, according to one of the country's most senior linguists, who predicts that in 50 years many common words will be spelt without ''irritating'' silent letters. | Will Oremus | If the economy of the future runs on our data, does that make us slave labour? | Peter Hannam and Leesha McKenny | The NBN has suffered its worst week with Telstra battling a local community after the discovery of asbestos and an accident that left a network-related contractor dead. | Adam Turner | Wi-Fi extenders fix wireless black spots, but these two also stream music. | Jenneth Orantia reviews the best apps for keeping one step ahead of the weather. | Tom Cowie | A new dumping ground for deadly asbestos fibres dug up during the rollout of the federal government's National Broadband Network has been revealed in Ballarat. | Todd Shields | Trade group of 450 booksellers joins Barnes & Noble and publishers in objecting to Amazon's application to win ownership of the .book domain. | David Sanger | The US and China have agreed to hold regular, high-level talks on how to set standards of behaviour for cyber security and commercial espionage - the first diplomatic effort to defuse the tensions over what the US says is a daily barrage of computer break-ins and theft of corporate and government secrets. | | | Advertisement Advertisement Compare & Save | Find the best mobile phone plan | | | | | | | | Security Reminder: Fairfax Media digital never requests personal or credit card information via email. 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