31st January 2005 Archive
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EU waves through Airbus mobile phone system
We're OnAir
There seems to be some confusion over the EU approval of the SITA-Airbus joint venture to put mobile phones onto aircraft. The approval has been granted- but it's a political approval, not a technical one - not yet. It remains to be seen if the magic works, and gets approval from Authority, but that looks likely. Meanwhile, …
Mobile 31 Jan 2005, 09:07
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Small.biz gets more spam
No filter, much spam
Small businesses are more likely to be targeted by spam email than larger companies. According to Postini, an email security firm, businesses with 100 or less computer users get up to 10 times more spam than corporates employing over 10,000 workers. It says that small businesses lacke the budget to invest in the latest anti- …
Small Biz 31 Jan 2005, 09:08
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EU balks at Windows Reduced Edition
End User Multimedia Functionality? That's what you told us to do!
The EU has scotched the name Microsoft had planned for the unbundled versions of Windows that it must ship in Europe as result of last year's antitrust decree. Microsoft had planned to call the products, both of which include a third-party replacement for its own Media Player, Windows XP Home Reduced Media Edition and Windows …
Operating Systems 31 Jan 2005, 09:16
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SBC rings AT&T for $16bn mega-merger
Talking telephone numbers...
SBC is buying former parent AT&T for $16bn in cash and shares. AT&T, or Ma Bell, was started in 1875 by Alexander Graham Bell. AT&T shareholders will get 0.77942 SBC shares for every AT&T share held and a special dividend of $1.30 per share. The deal was agreed by directors yesterday. SBC is a local specialist in the US. It …
Financial News 31 Jan 2005, 09:29
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Inland Revenue site buckling under load
Midnight deadline
The Inland Revenue website is creaking under the strain of last minute tax returns, as people try to beat the 31 January midnight deadline and avoid a £100 fine. Last week, up to 20,000 people per day were trying to file their completed self assessment forms. Over the weekend, this figure rose to 30,000, according to the Today …
Small Biz 31 Jan 2005, 10:01
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SMIC coughs $175m to settle espionage allegations
TSMC prevails
Chinese chip foundry SMIC has paid TSMC, the world's largest semiconductor producer, $175m to settle the legal action its Taiwanese rival launched against it last year. TSMC will receive the money over a six-year period, with $30m coming in the first five years, followed by a final payment of $25m, SMIC said this weekend. In …
Financial News 31 Jan 2005, 11:17
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Gates bemoans US visa restrictions
Lack of foreign computing students a 'disaster'
Bill Gates is worried that US visa restrictions, imposed after the 11 September attacks, are starting to damage the US software industry. Speaking at the World Economic Forum at Davos in Switzerland, the Microsoft chairman described the fall in visiting foreign computing students as a "disaster". After September 11, the US …
Developer 31 Jan 2005, 11:18
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Dutch turn town into supercomputer
Home PCs connected to computer grid
The Dutch town of Almere will host the world's first virtual city supercomputer or computer grid. And "Almeregrid" will rely primarily on home PCs connected to high speed fibre optic links. A grid is a hyper network that links computers and data storage owned by different organisations so that they can share computing power. In …
Data Networking 31 Jan 2005, 11:19
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Ebbers feared fortune would be 'wiped out'
Witness cites possible motive for alleged fraud
Bernie Ebbers feared that his personal fortune would be "wiped out" unless something was done to improve the financial health of ailing telecoms outfit WorldCom. Former financial controller David Myers recalled a meeting in 2001 where the former WorldCom boss called on senior execs to turn the company around. The stock price was …
Business 31 Jan 2005, 11:24
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Blaster copycat author jailed for 18 months
Parson escapes with minimum sentence
Jeffrey Lee Parson, author of a variant of the infamous Blaster worm, has been jailed for 18 months. The 19-year-old was also ordered to serve 100 hours of community service and spend three years on probation following his release at a sentencing hearing at the US District Court in Seattle last Friday (28 January). Rather than …
Malware 31 Jan 2005, 11:29
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IBM-Lenovo deal to face US govt. probe
$1.25bn sale depends on Bush's say-so
The US Treasury Department has been formally asked to investigate the national security ramifications of the sale of IBM's PC division to Chinese vendor Lenovo, a move that could yet scupper the $1.25bn deal. Last week, Republican Representatives Henry Hyde and Don Manzullo of Illinois, and Duncan Hunter of California made the …
PCs 31 Jan 2005, 11:37
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Music biz serves writ on German IT site
Cannot publish links to CD protection-busting outfit
German IT site Heise Online has received a writ preventing it from publishing links to Slysoft.com, a company that advertises software that can play, copy and rip protected audio CDs. The writ was served on Heise Zeitschriften Verlag last Friday by Munich law firm Waldorf on behalf of a number of major record companies: EMI, …
Music and Media 31 Jan 2005, 11:40
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SCO parent sued by former execs
Demand $100m and their jobs back
SCO is facing legal action from three former senior executives of its parent company who want $100m in damages and their old jobs back. The three men are former employees of Canopy, SCO's holding company. They claim they were unfairly removed in December last year after a boardroom coup led by Val Noorda Kreidel - daughter of …
Business 31 Jan 2005, 12:20
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Man urinates his way out of avalanche
Beer saves life
Hot on the heels of the tremendous news that beer can help fight cancer, we are delighted to report that a Slovak man trapped in his car by an avalanche urinated his way to freedom after working his way through 60 half-litre bottles of beer. According to Ananova, Richard Kral was off on holiday when the snow swallowed his Audi …
Bootnotes 31 Jan 2005, 12:21
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Intel, Nvidia were Q4's graphics chip winners
Smaller players fared less well
Intel and Nvidia both grew their share of the graphics chip market during Q4 2004, but their gain came not from their chief rival, ATI, so much as the smaller players in the field, market watcher Jon Peddie Research (JPR) said today. Even those companies who lost market share during the quarter could take some comfort from the …
PCs 31 Jan 2005, 12:21
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Rivals warn of BT 'delaying tactics'
UKCTA alert ahead of Telecoms Review deadline
BT's rivals are upping the war of words against the UK's former telecoms monopoly ahead of this week's crucial deadline. The UK's dominant fixed line telco has until February 3 to give its response to the regulator's demands for "substantive behavioural and organisational changes" within BT and the provision of equal access to …
Telecoms 31 Jan 2005, 13:35
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Interview with a link spammer
Exclusive It's nothing personal...
Sam - let's call our interviewee Sam, it's suitably anonymous - lives in a three-bedroom semi-detached house in London, drives a vintage Jaguar and runs his own company. But "it's not not all rock and roll and big money", says Sam. What isn't? Spamming websites and blogs with text to pump up the search engine rankings of sites …
Spam 31 Jan 2005, 13:41
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Hitachi brings IDE to 1.8in HDD line
Ups capacity, too
Hitachi's hard drive operation has added 40GB and 60GB models to its line of 1.8in hard drives, which it has refreshed with an IDE interface the better to broaden its appeal from MP3 player manufacturers and the like to notebook makers. The 20 and 30GB models launched last September had ZIF interfaces; the new models support …
Storage 31 Jan 2005, 14:12
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Casino rents eBay cleavage for £422
A lot of mams for its bucks
It appears that online casino Golden Palace has successfully rented the legally-displayable portion of the Scotswoman's breasts offered as advertising space on eBay. If so, the gambling outfit has - for a modest £422 - added another pair of assets to its unusual eBay purchase portfolio - the company recently paid $28,000 (£15, …
Bootnotes 31 Jan 2005, 14:39
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Apple updates G4 PowerBooks with Bluetooth 2.0
One last fling?
Apple has applied the keenly awaited upgrade to its PowerBook G4 line, cutting prices and improving the specs - though sadly, but not surprisingly, minus the much-desired G5 processor. The updated range sports a couple of new features, however. The bundled Bluetooth radio now runs version 2.0 of the wireless technology. Taking …
Mac Channel 31 Jan 2005, 14:45
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VIA unveils P4 PCI-E chipsets
'Two cards, four monitors' vs 'two cards, one screen'
VIA will today roll out its latest Pentium 4 chipsets, pitching the parts at mobo makers who want the graphics card flexibility that - the chip maker claims - rival products lack. Three chipsets are on the cards: the PT800 Pro, the PT894 and PT894 Pro. All three support dual-channel DDR and DDR 2 SDRAM at up to 667MHz, and can …
System Builder 31 Jan 2005, 15:15
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Touts flood eBay with black market tickets
340,000 during 2005, estimates security outfit
Some 340,000 black market tickets to gigs and sports events will be traded on eBay over the next 12 months, according to research from security outfit Group 4 Securicor. Its probe into black market tickets in the UK has found that punters will shell out around £11.4m 2.23m dodgy tickets over the coming year, with eager …
Financial News 31 Jan 2005, 15:23
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Women warm to online betting
Females who like a flutter
Online gambling in the UK has grown 566 per cent since 2003 and the fast growth is mainly due to a big increase in the number of women betting online. In the early 90s, women represented just four per cent of gamblers but now 20 per cent of British women visit an online casino or betting site more than once a year. The survey …
Financial News 31 Jan 2005, 16:00
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'Thiefproof' car key cracked
Grand Theft RFID
Researchers have discovered cryptographic vulnerabilities in the RFID technology used in high-security car keys and petrol pump payment systems. The attack against Texas Instruments DST tags used in vehicle immobilisers and ExxonMobil's SpeedPass system was identified by experts at Johns Hopkins University and RSA Laboratories …
Security 31 Jan 2005, 16:02
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Doom goes back to boardgame origins
Got no Clue?
If your PC's too weak to pump out acceptable Doom 3 framerates - or you're heart's just getting too old to cope with game-series' ever more frenetic pace, US company Fantasy Flight Games has the answer: the Doom boardgame. That's right, long after digital pastimes like the original Doom crushed demand for the more traditional …
Bootnotes 31 Jan 2005, 16:04
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Marconi picks Chinese hardware partner
Huawei makes another friend
Marconi and Huawei have come to mutually-loving distribution deal. The troubled telecoms firm will sell Huawei's carrier-grade data products, while Huawei will sell Marconi's access radio products. Along with signing a memorandum of understanding the firms have created working groups which will work together to form a stronger …
Data Networking 31 Jan 2005, 16:05
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Help required to build Reg reader profile
Spare us five minutes...
We at El Reg are always looking to improve and expand our services to better serve you, our beloved readership, and have put together an online survey to gain a better insight into our "demographic". The whole thing won't take up more than around five minutes of your valuable time. It's anonymous, so there are no worries about …
Site News 31 Jan 2005, 16:21
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Computing network warns of massive climate change
GlobalWarming@home
The world could be as much as 11°C hotter inside 50 years, according to the first results from climateprediction.net, an experimental distributed computing network set up to simulate climate change. The researchers ran more than 50,000 simulations of the potential future climate, based on a doubling of pre-industrial carbon …
Science 31 Jan 2005, 16:29
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BT biz broadband billing balls-up
Forgot to charge 700 customers
BT has forgotten to bill 700 of its business broadband punters, according to a report by the UK Broadband User Group. It's seen a copy of a memo which suggests that some of its business users have been using broadband - but haven't been charged. Said the memo: "Customers appear to be using a Business Broadband Connection even …
Small Biz 31 Jan 2005, 17:08
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Hormel Spam trademark case canned
Court rejects action against Spambuster
The UK High Court has decided that the curse of email - spam - is of greater significance than the meaty heart of a nutritious packed lunch - Spam canned meat. Deputy judge Richard Arnold QC was asked to invalidate the trademark "Spambuster", owned by email company Antilles Landscapes Investments, because it infringed the "Spam …
Spam 31 Jan 2005, 17:33
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Phishing morphs into pharming
Nascent threat worries security researchers
Fraudsters and mischief makers are developing more insidious techniques for tricking users into visiting bogus websites. Rather than using spam to con prospective victims into clicking their way to illicit sites - so called phishing attacks - internet ne'er-do-wells are using DNS poisoning or domain hijacks to redirect users to …
ID 31 Jan 2005, 17:49
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EMC finds vacuum for backup software upgrades
Don't tell. We have new wizards
EMC today opened a second front in its stealth backup software assault on Veritas. The storage giant let a couple of press releases about upgrades to its high-end Legato NetWorker and lower-end Dantz Retrospect products slip onto the wire without extending any noticeable alert to reporters. The strategy seems to have paid off, …
Storage 31 Jan 2005, 22:23
