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24th March 2006 Archive

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  • China breaks up illicit gaming and piracy networks

    Smack down

    China has shut down a number of online porn and piracy sites as part of its crackdown on internet smut and other illicit content. The clampdown has resulted in arrests in the Chinese provinces of Guangdong, Anhui and Hubei. In eastern China's Anhui province seven warez sites and 53 pornographic or violent games websites got the …

    Music and Media 24 Mar 2006, 00:02

  • Microsoft re-org elevates Office chief

    Can't make up its mind

    Microsoft has re-organized management and reporting for the third time in six months, further integrating its Windows and Office work and focusing on online services. Microsoft's six-month-old platform and services division has been divided into eight units, consisting of a combination of new and existing product and services …

    IT Director 24 Mar 2006, 00:42

  • Flock fellow flees

    I'm flocking off

    Flock's Chris Messina is leaving the company, five months after it unveiled its beta browser to the public. He served as "Director of Experience and Open Source Ambassador" for the startup. Flock wants to return the browser to the original vision hatched at CERN in 1991, where the client software was as much of a publishing …

    Music and Media 24 Mar 2006, 00:54

  • Lessig blesses DRM

    It's open source DRM, so it's good. Huh?

    If you arrive for work today and discover a grisly pool of brain tissue and bone fragments where a colleague used to sit, we may have the explanation right here. For in a move that risks causing Scanners-style head explosions across the land, Professor Lawrence Lessig has endorsed DRM. Not just any old digital rights …

    Music and Media 24 Mar 2006, 06:10

  • T-Mobile to make mobile net service 'unlimited'

    Fair Usage Policy applies

    T-Mobile UK is to make its Web'n'walk mobile internet service "unlimited" giving punters access to an "all-you-can-eat" product for £7.50 a month. Due to be launched on 1 April, the unlimited Web'n'walk service will enable punters to browse the web, check out email and chat whenever they want. But although the service is " …

    Mobile 24 Mar 2006, 07:02

  • Fujitsu stacks up SOA

    Could Japan congeal SOA hot air?

    In as much as Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) are predominantly hot air rather than current implementation strategy for most of both the user and vendor community, it is quite difficult to point to any from either camp that can be readily identified as an obvious leader. With the launch of SystemWalker, however, Fujitsu …

    Developer 24 Mar 2006, 07:02

  • Mozilla Thunderbird wrecked my relationship

    Open source - the new homewrecker

    Hot on the heels of a woman who blames a bug in Firefox for exposing the flaws in her relationship with a fiancé comes the tale of a young lad whose relationship was hit by the spam filtering shortcomings of Thunderbird, the email client companion of Firefox. "Last year, my girlfriend of 15 months went away to Costa Rica on a …

    Applications 24 Mar 2006, 09:36

  • BBC kicks off HD balls in May

    Geek TV Plus the best of this weekend's telly

    By Jane Hoskyn, TV Scoop So, the BBC's first venture into the brave new world of HD TV will be balls. Football and tennis fans are to be the inaugural beneficiaries of high-definition pictures from the Beeb, with the World Cup and Wimbledon to be screened in HD. What a missed opportunity. High-def will surely be wasted on …

    Bootnotes 24 Mar 2006, 09:42

  • Global IT spending to rise 6.3 per cent in 2006: IDC

    Large ones all round

    Worldwide spending on IT will rise by 6.3 per cent during 2006 as a result of economic stability in the US, Europe and Japan and robust growth in emerging markets. That's according to a new forecast issued by the research firm IDC which predicts that growth will be strongest in the software market, where spending will grow by 7 …

    Channel Register 24 Mar 2006, 10:14

  • Plusnet inks LLU deal with Tiscali

    Exciting, no?

    PlusNet is to piggyback onto Tiscali's LLU network to provide broadband services in the UK. The Sheffield-based ISP has been trialling Tiscali's service since late last year as it looks to get the best deal by sourcing wholesale broadband from a range of network suppliers. Today it confirmed that following successful trials it …

    Telecoms 24 Mar 2006, 10:25

  • Toshiba defeats Hynix in Tokyo court

    Toshiba 1, Hynix 0

    Hynix suffered a set-back in the Tokyo District Court today when the judge ruled that the South Korean company infringed a NAND Flash patent held by Toshiba and ordered it to pay ¥7.8m ($66,000) in damages. Infringing Hynix products may not now be imported into Japan. Hynix immediately said it would appeal against the verdict …

    Reg Hardware 24 Mar 2006, 10:32

  • IBM plots 'chip on a molecule'

    Silicon on borrowed time?

    A functioning processor on a single molcule has been created by IBM scientists, offering the possibility of super-fast processing by tiny devices. The molecule in question is a carbon nanotube. The team at at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center, New York, created a type of logic device called a ring oscillator. It consisted …

    Science 24 Mar 2006, 10:57

  • Sony says PS3 will be region-free

    Games, certainly; movies... maybe

    Sony has confirmed that the PlayStation 3 will not impose a region-coding scheme on games. That the consumer electronics giant was considering such a move was first signalled in November 2005, but it was made official policy this week by the company's head of games development, Phil Harrison. The revelation came in a Q&A …

    Reg Hardware 24 Mar 2006, 11:02

  • May launch for Sky HD

    £300 for the box and £10 a month to subscribe

    HDTVUK - blogging in high def Sky has announced a May launch for its HD service. Its rather rather annoying HD website not only has the details of pricing but also says that installations for the service will begin in May. It seems very unlikely that Sky would begin installations without having launched the service. It seems …

    Networks 24 Mar 2006, 11:07

  • PC World de-commissions sales floor

    Group hugs instead of arm-twisting

    Sales staff at PC World are being encouraged to help customers rather than twist their arms into buying things they didn't visit the store to buy. They have had their commission axed by their employer to encourage them to help customers instead of bemusing them with technical patter, piling their arms high with gadgets and …

    Channel Register 24 Mar 2006, 11:26

  • Alcatel, Lucent confirm 'merger of equals' talks

    Do you take this networking giant to be...

    Alcatel and Lucent could be about to tie the knot after the telecoms equipment makers confirmed they are mulling a merger. If successful the deal could be worth $33bn with the enlarged group generating revenues of $22bn. In a joint statement issued yesterday the firms said: "We can confirm that Lucent and Alcatel are engaged …

    Data Networking 24 Mar 2006, 11:41

  • Feds nix Check Point's Sourcefire bid

    $255m deal sunk

    A takeover bid by an Israeli firewall firm has become the latest victim of US security protectionism. Check Point Software has dropped its bid for US rival Sourcefire after objections from the FBI and Pentagon were heard by the Treasury's Committee on Foreign Investments. The Committee has also overseen the recent rumpus …

    Enterprise Security 24 Mar 2006, 11:56

  • Universal launches movie downloads... at DVD prices

    Analysis Defining the market dynamics before Apple can?

    Lovefilm.com will next month extend its full-length movie download service from rentals to pay-to-own. It will kick of the offer on 10 April with the latest King Kong remake, charging £20 for a copy of the DVD and a pair of digital downloads, one for desktop usage, the other for portable media players. The scheme, a joint …

    Reg Hardware 24 Mar 2006, 12:10

  • Nvidia wins more Sony contracts

    Expected to generate more revenue than the PS3 GPU deal

    Nvidia is going to get more money out of Sony - more, in fact, than it garnered for developing the PlayStation 3's graphics chip, the company revealed this week, though it won't say what the work's for. The cash will come from "new contracts with Sony to do some further designs", Nvidia CFO Marv Burkett, said this week. …

    Reg Hardware 24 Mar 2006, 12:38

  • Expressing yourself in Java: Regular Expressions

    They can be rather opaque, but also extremely powerful

    Regular expressions are an area of computing that most of us know a little about, have a rough understanding of, but have often avoided using except when absolutely necessary. In the past, they often required the use of tools such as Perl, rather than languages such as Java. However, for some time now, in fact since Java …

    Developer 24 Mar 2006, 13:59

  • Microsoft won't open up Office till January

    Roadmap leads to wintry Vista

    Microsoft Vista developers spending Christmas trying to finally finish the product will now have a little company from their colleagues in the Office division. A day after confirming Vista will not now appear until January 2007, Microsoft has confirmed that its applications suite will also not hit general availability until the …

    Applications 24 Mar 2006, 14:01

  • Palm sales up, shipments down

    Buoyed by smart-phone shift

    Palm saw its sales rise 36 per cent year on year during the third quarter of its 2006 fiscal year. Revenues for the three-month period reached $388.5m, down 12.6 per cent on the previous quarter's $444.6m, though a Q2-Q3 dip is traditional. Net income for the quarter came to $29.9m (28 cents a share), according to GAAP rules …

    Reg Hardware 24 Mar 2006, 14:05

  • BOFH: Clear and present danger

    Episode 11 When loop pile carpet attacks

    Nothing starts a day worse than the Boss wandering into Mission Control with a clipboard in his hand. It's just never a good sign... "Just collecting your thoughts on who the new Health and Safety representative for the floor should be?" "Oh yes, yes, very good," I respond enthusiatically. "And about time too!" "So you're …

    BOFH 24 Mar 2006, 14:23

  • RIM's 3G Blackberry launch imminent

    Vodafone has the gig, apparently

    Research in Motion (RIM) has partnered with Vodafone to bring the first 3G-enabled Blackberry device to market, Reg Hardware has learned. The machine is based on the 8700 series launched last year. The 8707v is based on a 312MHz Intel PXA901 processor backed with 16MB of SRAM and 64MB of Flash memory. In addition to 3G …

    Reg Hardware 24 Mar 2006, 14:55

  • Cassini beams back dazzling photo album

    'Ave that, Ansel Adams

    NASA's probe Saturn Cassini has sent back spectacular views from the Solar System's second largest planet. The above image shows the tiny cratered moon Janus passing in front of Saturn's famous rings. It's dwarfed by whopper of a moon Titan behind, with a thin cresent lit by the Sun. Titan is bigger than inner planet Mercury …

    Science 24 Mar 2006, 15:12

  • Asus W2Vc 17in widescreen notebook

    Review A stylish aluminium clad 17in notebook from Asus...

    With the notebooks taking a huge share of the home market, Sony has been one of the most popular brands, partly due to its stylish designs, but mostly thanks to its well-know brand name. Asus seems to be very keen on taking some of Sony’s share in the home laptop market, and the W2Vc is one in a range of new ultra-stylish …

    Reg Hardware 24 Mar 2006, 15:22

  • E-commerce not relevant, say SMEs

    Too expensive too

    There appears to be little appetite for e-commerce among the UK's SMEs who are put off trading online due to skills shortages and the high costs involved in setting up websites. That's according to a survey by the Federation of Small Business (FSB) which found that just two in ten of the trade group's 195,000 business members …

    Channel Register 24 Mar 2006, 15:41

  • NHS IT probe useless

    For the NHS, anyway, says expert

    By the time the official audit of the government's £6.1bn NHS IT modernisation is published in the summer it will be too late to be of any the cash-strapped NHS, said a leading contributor to the investigation. However, the National Audit Office report might contain a valuable lesson for other arms of the public sector …

    Public Sector 24 Mar 2006, 15:52

  • Podcast licensing, my arse

    Letters And you can shove your RFID up your...

    Sadly, it appears that RFID chips are not going to go away and die the miserable, lonely death they so clearly deserve. Still, let's look on the bright side, eh? They give eggheads plenty of hours of amusement working out where they can stick 'em. That's in your mouth, btw: Whilst the obvious problems with putting a RFID into …

    Letters 24 Mar 2006, 16:03

  • Need some corporate lift music? Click here

    Fool/money/parted

    If your company finds itself in need of a corporate aural brand frontage, and has not been sufficiently warned of the possible dangers posed by letting deranged musos loose in the boardroom, then hotfoot it down to eNthem - "a revolutionary new project, that hopefully, will change the business world forever!" And how. Here's …

    Bootnotes 24 Mar 2006, 16:13

  • Brits dial up naked phone calls

    That's when they're not nodding off

    A third of Brits make phone calls while stark bollock naked, according to research from the Post Office, with four in ten blokes and three in ten lasses letting it all hang out while chatting on the blower. If you thought that was naughty, think again. One in ten of those quizzed admitted to wandering off and leaving the caller …

    Bootnotes 24 Mar 2006, 16:16

  • Bluedelta extends SmartSCART AV connector

    Even more SCART, S-video and RCA ports

    Bluedelta Designs has updated is SmartSCART router, increasing not only the number of SCART connections it can intelligently and automatically route signals between but also adding stereo audio and a pair of RCA compostite video and two S-video inputs too. The SmartSCART Plus has six SCART inputs and a seventh SCART connector …

    Reg Hardware 24 Mar 2006, 16:22

  • Trojan intercepts bank tokens

    TAN marks exposed

    A newly discovered Trojan is intercepting the TAN codes used as security tokens by customers of two major German banks, Postbank and Deutsche Bank, according to anti-virus experts. Until now, TAN codes were pretty safe, in particular against phishing attacks, as these tokens are sent either through (snail) mail or by SMS. …

    Malware 24 Mar 2006, 16:23

  • Fidelity lost HP's employee data to impress HP

    We'll show you

    Given the recent spate of laptop losses affecting major companies, many of you have wondered why the likes of Fidelity and Ernst & Young would let crucial customer information leave their own servers and desktops in the first place. Well, in Fidelity's case, we've learned that the company had a really important demo to perform …

    Enterprise Security 24 Mar 2006, 18:23

  • Oklahoma city threatens to call FBI over 'renegade' Linux maker

    Our mistake is YOUR problem

    The heartland turned vicious this week when an Oklahoma town threatened to call in the FBI because its web site was hacked by Linux maker Cent OS. Problem is CentOS didn't hack Tuttle's web site at all. The city's hosting provider had simply botched a web server. This tale kicked off yesterday when Tuttle's city manager Jerry …

    Bootnotes 24 Mar 2006, 20:20

  • 'ARRRRRGH!!!! GRRrrrrrr!!!!! RAAWWRRR!!!!! ... Dummy'

    FoTW Primal Scream Therapy

    We're often bowled over by the erudition of you, our readers. But this one is special. Peter Petrovski offers this learned contribution to the ongoing epistemological debate about Wikipedia. Here it is. Subject: Reg reader comment: Nature mag cooked Wikipedia study God you're a dummy. I suggest you learn how to write an …

    Letters 24 Mar 2006, 21:48

  • Jobs dumps Apple stock

    In brief Vested? Sell!

    Apple Computer founder and CEO Steve Jobs sold 45 per cent of his Apple stock this week. Jobs sold 4.57m shares at a price of $64.66, netting him a cool $295m. Jobs was granted the 10m shares in 2003, but they didn't vest until now. Jobs retains 120,000 vested stocks that were granted in 1997. Last year, Jobs earned $1 salary …

    Financial News 24 Mar 2006, 23:07