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28th February 2003 Archive

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  • Pogo bounces users to GPRS

    Update Company statement

    Pogo, the UK wireless PDA maker, today told subscribers that it was withdrawing GSM connectivity: from here on in it's a GPRS-only world. Fair dos, but the company is making the switch with just one day's notice. This has irritated some: Andy Doran, for example, writes in NewsWireless.net: "I'm sad and have to try and figure …

    Mobile 28 Feb 2003, 00:00

  • Orange SPV MS smartphone cert security cracked

    Weirdly unhard procedure, too...

    The Orange SPV has achieved the dubious distinction of being the first Microsoft smartphone to have its security cracked. Orange as set the phones up so they will only run Orange-certified applications, but as yet hasn't got much further than promises when it comes to telling people how you develop for it, get apps certified, …

    Mobile 28 Feb 2003, 00:00

  • Nokia picture phone IDs lurking villains

    Killer app found for picture messaging?

    Police in Italy have recorded what is thought to be the world's first conviction thanks to a tip-off using an image sent by a mobile picture phone. Two thieves were jailed for six months last week after a shopkeeper became suspicious as they loitered outside his shop. So concerned was the tobacconist, he snapped the two men …

    Mobile 28 Feb 2003, 00:10

  • Opera's phone browser goes live on the S-E P800

    Review By Jordan Holt and Ewan Spence

    During the months and months of build up to the release of the Sony Ericsson P800, quite a few reviews of the early pre release devices stated that it would include the Opera browser in the final release. Many people, myself included, were relieved to hear this - finally, a mobile device that will have full support for frames, …

    Mobile 28 Feb 2003, 00:10

  • Motorola gambles big on Linux, Sinocapitalism

    3GSM Great Leap Forward

    Inspired or insane, you'll have to decide, but Motorola yesterday vowed to make Linux the mainstay of its low and midrange phones. This has much to do with its China strategy, the result of its pioneering forays in basing design and manufacturing on the continent, and using feedback from Asian markets with experiments such as …

    Mobile 28 Feb 2003, 00:10

  • Symbian takes charge at Symbian

    3GSM For a change

    Symbian will remain in the user interface business, despite giving every indication over the past 20 months that user interfaces weren't really what it was all about. Last autumn Symbian confirmed that it had in fact ceased developing UIs business in 2001. (See Symbian pulls out of UI business, doesn't tell anybody With the …

    Mobile 28 Feb 2003, 00:10

  • Microsoft explains (inaudible) phone behavior

    3GSM Mystery solved

    Microsoft VP and smartphone honcho Juha Christensen says that a third party transcription service was to blame for censoring references to his former employer Symbian at a trade show a couple of years ago. At one of his very first public appearances for Microsoft, references to Symbian, which Christensen helped to create while …

    Mobile 28 Feb 2003, 00:10

  • Symbian phone content tech flies via Magpie spin-off

    Is it a browser, a UI, content management?

    Symbian's Magpie content delivery technology, which has been lurking in the wings for some considerable time, looks in severe danger of going live soon, via Magpie Mobile Technologies (MMT). Magpie is pitched by Symbian as part content embedding, part delivery system, its overall objective being to deliver small amounts of …

    Mobile 28 Feb 2003, 00:10

  • PocketPC reshuffle ousts celeb blogger

    Sits Vac

    Another reshuffle at Microsoft's PocketPC team has seen lead evangelist Beth Goza redeployed to the Windows division after a turbulent year with Pocket PC marketing. There's no immediate successor in place, a company spokesperson told us yesterday. Beth was a popular host of the Mobius conference, where grassroots fans sites …

    Personal 28 Feb 2003, 00:10

  • Nokia on Linux, Symbian and NGage

    3GSM Polishing the crystal ball

    Nokia senior VP Niklaus Savander submitted himself to a Register grilling this morning. Vendors have been making these interviews increasingly difficult for us at 3GSM by refusing to make the kind of grandiose statements that have characterized past mobile phone shows. It's all very subdued, because as one component vendor said …

    Mobile 28 Feb 2003, 00:10

  • Bluetooth problems plague the Nokia 6310i

    Flaky software to blame

    Bluetooth compatibility issues with the Nokia 6310i is likely due to flaky software. That's our conclusion after investigating reports from readers that Bluetooth-enabled Nokia 310i phones will talk only to one special Bluetooth adapter. In other words, the 6310i is not using standards-based Bluetooth connectivity. Reg reader …

    Mobile 28 Feb 2003, 00:10

  • Cognima demos self healing, self updating mobile phone

    Your contacts synced now, tomorrow the lot?

    London-based start-up Cognima has received plenty of press in the financial pages since it was founded in 2001, by attracting VC money and top talent with roots in Symbian, Apple and Palm. But until today it was extremely secretive about what it was up to. Now the cloaking shields have been de-activated, their wares are on …

    Mobile 28 Feb 2003, 00:11

  • BenQ preps Symbian phone

    Nothing official

    BenQ, the company which used to be Acer's contract manufacturing arm, is prepping a Symbian OS phone for Q3, 2003 -"or later", says Digitimes. The newswire notes that BenQ is the first Taiwanese phone maker to commit to Symbian. Which is nice, if true. It probably is, but Symbian itself will tell us only that the report is " …

    Mobile 28 Feb 2003, 00:12

  • The Beast, MS Office 2003, and the Big Nada

    We're gagging for it...

    Microsoft had a big surprise for The Register on Monday. After an 11 hour flight to San Francisco to attend the Microsoft Office 2003 Reviewer's Workshop (no, we don't know why either) the Beast hit us with the Big NDA. Surprise...! Actually, although it is effectively a big NDA, it's one of the smallest and weirdest we've ever …

    Software 28 Feb 2003, 00:37

  • Popup Senator debuts cellphone rights bill

    Number portability

    Senator Chuck Schumer of New York has introduced a bill to ensure that your cellphone number belongs to you, rather than your greedy carrier. It's one of several measures in his "cellphone rights bill", that he unveiled earlier this week. Right now, the plan is to ensure number portability between networks by November. But …

    Business 28 Feb 2003, 00:51

  • Vodafone mops up Portuguese minorities

    Share offer

    The Vodafone minorities "squeeze out" juggernaut has landed in Portugal. The mobile network operator today publishes the terms of its offer to buy out the 38.6 per cent in Portuguese sub Telecel, or Vodafone Telecel-Comunicacoes Pessoais, S.A. to give it is proper name, that it does not already own. Vodafone is offering &euro 8 …

    Mobile 28 Feb 2003, 10:31

  • WS-I consortium: candidates revealed

    Nokia throws hat in ring

    After several weeks of leaks and rumours, the Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) consortium has officially released the final list of candidates for the two coveted empty seats on its board. SeeBeyond Technology and Nokia are the latest companies to be revealed as contenders, joining Verisign, Cape Clear Software, webMethods …

    Hardware 28 Feb 2003, 11:00

  • Windows Update keeps tabs on all system software

    Spy on the wire

    Evidence obtained by German hardware site tecChannel suggests a list of software installed on an XP machine is sent to Microsoft when users run Windows Update. When patches are downloaded, a few kilobytes of data are sent in the opposite direction over a secure SSL channel. Because the data is encrypted a simple packet sniffer …

    Software 28 Feb 2003, 11:02

  • Dixons has ‘scale monopoly’ in extended warranties

    Ain't necessarily bad

    The Competition Commission today set out the terms of reference of its investigation into the UK market for extended warranties on domestic electrics. Worth an estimated £800m a year, EWs cover the UK PC retail business as well as the white and brown goods sectors. Extended warranties are very, very profitable, hence pressure …

    Personal 28 Feb 2003, 11:42

  • Microsoft, EA may make bid for Sega

    Windows for Hedgehogs?

    Troubled videogame company Sega, which had announced plans to merge with Sammy Corporation, may have two new suitors: Microsoft and Electronic Arts. The Asian Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that both companies were considering buying all or parts of Sega, although no formal talks were ongoing. Earlier this month Sega …

    Personal 28 Feb 2003, 12:13

  • Game loses EB royalty case

    Steinbrecher to step down

    The Game Group has lost its battle to overturn a one per cent royalty on UK sales to Electronics Boutique, after the Court of Appeal upheld an earlier court decision. Europe's biggest video games retailer must now continue paying Electronics Boutique ome per cent of UK turnover until January 2006. In April 2002, Game, then …

    Channel 28 Feb 2003, 12:54

  • Klez-H tops monthly virus charts. Again

    The old ones are still the worst

    The infamous Klez-H was the most common virus circulating on the Internet this month. Again. Monthly stats from managed services firm MessageLabs show it blocked 366,393 copies of Klez-H over the last four weeks. Virus infection rates are running at around one per 350 emails, compared to one in 30 infected emails at the …

    Malware 28 Feb 2003, 12:58

  • NTT Verio ‘deletes’ AOL flower scam site

    Kudos to Reg Reader

    A big pat on the back for Reg Reader Alexander Burke, of Kingston, Ontario, Canada, a self-confessed "hardware hacker and all-around technogeek". On reading our article You got Flowers! Email scam targets AOL users. Alex did a little detective work. He tracked the IP address of the AOL account rip-off site to a server on the …

    Security 28 Feb 2003, 13:52

  • Lexmark wins Round 1 in DMCA chip case

    Get your toner cartridges off our lawn

    Lexmark has gained an early success in its Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) case against an obscure maker of toner cartridge chips. The firm, Static Control inc., is ordered by a US court to "cease making, selling or otherwise trafficking in the Smartek(TM) microchip used in the remanufacturing of laser toner cartridges …

    Personal 28 Feb 2003, 14:52

  • Snack companies fined $185,000 for violating kids' online privacy

    Hershey Foods and Mrs Fields Cookies taken to task by FTC

    American snack companies Hershey Foods and Mrs Fields Cookies have been fined $85,000 and $100,000 respectively for violating children's privacy on their websites. The hefty fines were issued by the Federal Trade Commission after it decided both companies had broken the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by …

    Music and Media 28 Feb 2003, 17:33

  • Total Poindexter Awareness tech spooks – a Who's Who

    Weren't we not supposed to know this?

    INSECURITY LEVEL: PINK One of the great post-War technology trends has been reversed since 9/11, almost without any noticing. For many years now technology that was developed for military use, or with the help of military funding, has found a commercial civilian use. Think of the Internet, or CDMA. But what we're seeing now …

    Software 28 Feb 2003, 19:34

  • Google in paedo censorship debacle

    Swayed by frothing Chester councillors

    Google has found itself at the centre of a censorship row after it removed a link to a "sickening paedophile site" after pressure from councillors in the lovely UK city of Chester and frothing lead stories in local newspaper The Chester Chronicle. The site in question is far from a paedophile site however, as was made clear to …

    Music and Media 28 Feb 2003, 22:56

  • The Great Year 2003 Bug

    Email hoax

    A chain letter being distributed via email today bizarrely predicts that the Internet will stop working on Monday. The email claims that the so-called "Year 2003 Bug" was discovered on 23 February, and that essential Internet equipment will be triggered to stop working on the 030303 date. According to the chain letter "No one …

    Music and Media 28 Feb 2003, 22:59

  • BT cuts IT contractor rates. Again

    'Market conditions'

    BT is to impose a 12.5 per cent pay cut on contractors employed by its BT Computing Partners division from the start of April. The pay cut, which is non-negotiable, is the latest in a series of pay cuts to fall on contractors since October 2001, that have left workers with a third less take home pay. The latest cuts follow the …

    Business 28 Feb 2003, 23:07