17th November 2006 Archive

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AOL appoints first UK MD

Jonesco a-go-go

AOL UK has appointed a new MD to steer the firm through the wake of selling off its broadband subscriber base to Carphone Warehouse. Former newspaper suit Andy Jonesco will report to fellow new jobber Carlo d'Asaro Biondo, who was promoted from CEO of AOL France to the President of AOL Europe earlier this month. He will also …

Networks 17 Nov 2006, 00:02
McNealy: Sun can solve global warming

Give us servers and nuclear power

Scott McNealy may no longer be leading the charge at Sun Microsystems but he still knows a good Sun sales opportunity when he sees it. The company’s former CEO used the recording of a US TV chat show on "Going Green" to showcase Sun's Niagara chip, T1000 servers, Project Blackbox and Sun Rays as potential planet savers. He …

Servers 17 Nov 2006, 04:00
Through the (walled) garden gate...

Analysis How much is stuff you've already bought worth?

It's not often the press gets an opportunity to say nice things about a mobile operator - because it's been so rare to find an enlightened mobile operator. But Hutchison's 3 network must be waking up this morning to an unfamiliar sensation, of being praised. The operator that became synonymous with "walled garden content" …

Mobile 17 Nov 2006, 06:29
Would-be kidnapper shoots self in 'nads

Bit of a balls-up off

A 23-year-old Wichita man shot himself in the wedding tackle during a bodged kidnap attempt, The Wichita Eagle reports. The unnamed perp, along with two accomplices, "attempted to kidnap a teenager in a dispute over stereo speakers" in South Wichita on Monday afternoon. The shooter first fired a shot at the intended victim, but …

Music and Media 17 Nov 2006, 09:27
HP results shrug off scandal

Not just an ink/pretexting giant

HP made revenues of $24.6bn in the fourth quarter ended 31 October 2006 – up seven per cent on the same period last year. GAAP operating income was $1.7bn, up from $0.4bn last year, giving earnings per share of 0.68 cents. CEO and chairman Mark Hurd welcomed the results and said they were evidence of the success of the …

Financial News 17 Nov 2006, 09:40
PC World gets down to business

50,000 products available online

PC World is looking to change the way Irish SMEs buy technology with the launch of a new "one-stop" website offering over 50,000 IT products and solutions. Aimed solely at businesses, the site allows users to set up an online account, order products and receive online billing, with payment due within 30 days. The new PC …

Small Biz 17 Nov 2006, 09:50
Google draws in iRows

Whatever floats your boat

Google quietly snaffled up Israeli online spreadsheet vendor iRows earlier this week. The founders of the firm posted a note on their blog this week saying the were joining Google. “We launched iRows in January, and will shut it down on 31-Dec-2006. This has been a very busy year for us,” they said. Back in September, the …

Applications 17 Nov 2006, 10:15
'Blagging' info thieves fined £14,800

Married couple sold info to private eyes

A married couple has been convicted of stealing and selling personal data and has been ordered to pay £14,800 in fines and costs. Between them the pair were convicted of 25 cases of illegally obtaining and selling information. The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), which brought the case, said it has begun an …

ID 17 Nov 2006, 10:19
Telstra, NatWest admit DNS problems

Start of winter flu season?

Telstra Europe and NatWest have blamed domain name server problems for the service downtime both suffered yesterday. In a statement, Telstra said: "Telstra Europe is experiencing a problem with its DNS (Domain Name Server) service and is currently investigating the cause of this problem to ensure that a full service can be …

IT Director 17 Nov 2006, 10:50
AMD accused of patent violation

Opti files lawsuit

US chip-related intellectual property company Opti has accused AMD of infringing three of its patents, all centring on techniques microprocessors can use to predict cache memory access requirements. Opti's lawsuit, filed with the US District Court for the Eastern Texas, claims AMD is shipping CPUs that use such techniques and …

Reg Hardware 17 Nov 2006, 10:54
Who knows what there is to know about the nose?

Nosey parker

Also in this week's column: Do humans have a compass in their nose? Who knows what there is to know about the nose? Asked by Charli Tricase of Amherst, Massachusetts, USA Does your nose smell what your eyes see? Research suggests that the nose does indeed smell what the eyes see. The human sense of smell is unreliable …

Biology 17 Nov 2006, 11:20
Do humans have a compass in their nose?

Homing ~~pigeons~~ humans

Also in this week's column: Who knows what there is to know about the nose? Do humans have a compass in their nose? Asked by Lee Staniforth of Manchester, UK Some years ago scientists at CALTECH (California Institute of Technology in Pasadena) discovered that humans possess a tiny, shiny crystal of magnetite in the ethmoid …

Biology 17 Nov 2006, 11:22
NAO gets loved up on gov IT

Takes pet projects for walk in the sun

The National Audit Office (NAO) has broken with its tradition of testing the veracity of government activities with the publication of a report about some IT projects the government has managed successfully. Yes, you heard it right. There are, apparently, successful government IT projects. In its 23 year history the NAO has …

IT Director 17 Nov 2006, 11:27
Sony Ericsson readies RAZR-killer?

More likely gunning for Samsung's market share

Sony Ericsson is to take Motorola and Samsung head on next year by launching an super-slim Walkman-branded candybar handset of its own, it has been claimed. Codenamed 'Ai', the phone is said to be a mere 9.4mm thick. So claims Reuters, citing an industry throat. 'Ai', it seems, comes from Ai Sugiyama, a rather successful …

Reg Hardware 17 Nov 2006, 11:38
RTL tipped to bid for ITV

German media group to snatch NTL deal?

German media group RTL is preparing a £5bn bid for ITV according to reports. Last week UK cable monopoly NTL was said to be preparing a bid for the troubled commercial broadcaster. The Financial Times reports that while US-listed NTL works to formalize its bid, RTL, Europe's largest broadcaster is working with private backers …

Networks 17 Nov 2006, 11:39
BOFH: When non-IT people make IT decisions

Episode 39 Brace for impact

It's going to be a bad day, I can just feel it. All it'd take is the Boss to walk in with... "Hi, could you cast your eye over this?" the Boss asks, placing a large folder on the desk in front of me. "I...I'm rather busy," I lie. "But I told the guy we'd look over it," the Boss says. "And everyone loves a man of his word …

BOFH 17 Nov 2006, 12:02
Site names missing child abuse offenders

Most unwanted

A new website identifies paedophiles who have gone missing. The move by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) centre represents the first time UK law enforcement authorities have teamed up to publically publish details of convicted child abuse offenders. Information on the site includes the details of five …

Music and Media 17 Nov 2006, 12:13
Aussie drunk driver threatens cops with snake

Slippery customer

A drunk driver pulled in Australia's Northern Territory made good his escape after threatening officers with a snake, National Nine News reports. Constable Dale Howe and his partner were on patrol last Saturday night when they saw a car "swerving" across the highway. They pulled the vehicle and breathalised the teenage driver, …

Music and Media 17 Nov 2006, 12:18
Shock, horror, outrage - biometric passport data snooped, again

Insecurity as a design feature...

The biometric passport has been 'cracked' again - but it's the same crack as the old crack (which is not exactly a crack). This time it's the new UK passport, and Liberal Home Affairs spokesman Nick Clegg is calling for the urgent recall of all the 3 million that have already been issued. No2ID national coordinator Phil Booth, …

ID 17 Nov 2006, 12:47
OCZ spins memory cooler for overclockers

Clip it on yer DIMMs

Memory specialist OCZ has launched an active cooling system for memory modules. The aluminium XTC Cooler contains a pair of 60mm "ultra-low noise" fans and clips on top of all the host PC's DDR DIMMs as one. It's all done in the name of overclocking, of course, and the fan unit is designed to work particularly well with memory …

Reg Hardware 17 Nov 2006, 12:53
AMD's chipset naming scheme: details emerge

ATI codenames to the fore

AMD's anticipated plan to rebrand many of ATI's chipsets under its own name will go beyond the X series products, as revealed earlier this week, to offer T-, G-, V- and M-class parts as new chipsets come to market, it has been claimed. AMD's naming scheme will run something like this, Chinese-language website HKEPC reckons. …

Reg Hardware 17 Nov 2006, 13:22
Symbol readies slimmer corporate PDA phone?

Exclusive MC35 said to offer VoIP, push-to-talk, optional Wi-Fi

Barcode reader specialist and soon-to-be Motorola subsidiary Symbol may be set to launch its latest PDA phone in Q1 2007, Reg Hardware has learned, a more lightweight alternative to the beefier devices it's offered to date. Dubbed the MC35, the handheld is said to be a "durable, lightweight... all-in-one enterprise …

Reg Hardware 17 Nov 2006, 13:28
Dell buys reseller, BT buys PlusNet and everyone buys HP

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Results, or not... Dell was forced to delay quarterly results this week and admitted that the probe from the SEC has turned formal. The company was due to report on Thursday but now hopes to release results by the end of the month. HP, meanwhile, shrugged off recent spying scandals to show revenue of $24.6bn for the three …

Business 17 Nov 2006, 14:11
Hippy geeks threaten supercomputing masculinity

SC06 My cluster is greener than yours

There's no bigger boast in the supercomputing field than being able to say, "mine's bigger than yours". A handful of researchers, however, hope to tweak this bragging contest to something along the lines of "mine's pretty big and greener than yours". The researchers have pushed out a new "Green 500" list meant to complement the …

Servers 17 Nov 2006, 14:48
MS London Tube crash: all is revealed

Letter An insider sets us straight

It appears this week's London Tube crash outrage was not after all caused by spyware, or adware, or the Yahoo! toolbar, as we recklessly suggested. Here are the facts from the horse's mouth, whose identity must remain a closely-guarded secret: Hey there, I worked on this project for most of its duration and can …

Hardware 17 Nov 2006, 14:54
Giant Colonel Sanders visible from space

Welcome to our planet - have some chicken

Kentucky Fried Chicken reckons it's the first company whose logo is visible from space after piecing together a huge mosaic of Colonel Sanders in the Nevada desert. The pic of the Colonel comprises 65,000 one-foot-square painted tiles laid out on a plot near Rachel, Nevada. Gone is Sanders' traditional suit, replaced by a with- …

Space 17 Nov 2006, 14:56
Cancel ID cards, un-ban the hunt, and resign - Tony B's e-petitions

Press red button for e-government. Not.

Earlier this week the Government's Ten Downing Street web site launched the beta of an e-petitions system in conjunction with mysociety.org, which runs a string of worthy and useful government-related sites, most of them orders of magnitudes more effective than their government-run equivalents. But looking at some of the …

Music and Media 17 Nov 2006, 15:07
IBM extends NetApp line

Fills hole in SMB range

IBM's reliance on NetApp for its small and mid-range storage kit was extended today with the announcement of a new box in the N-series. The N-series began in April 2005 in a bid to loosen the stranglehold of EMC and HP among mid-sized customers. In return for NAS expertise, IBM provides NetApp with tape technology for package …

Storage 17 Nov 2006, 15:08
Gear4 BluEye iPod-phone adaptor

Review FM radio and player remote control too

When I previewed the BlyEye Bluetooth-based iPod-to-phone connector in August this year, I was impressed by its size, its functioanlity and its price. There were some glitches, of course, but the unit I looked at was a pre-production sample, and developer Mavizen had given itself two months to iron out the wrinkles... You can …

Reg Hardware 17 Nov 2006, 15:10
Security firm Guidance settles FTC breach charges

Negligence rebuke

Guidance Software, the security company whose computer forensics software helps firms identify the source of hacking attacks, has settled with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over charges that it failed to protect its own customers' data from attack. The FTC said Guidance failed to take "reasonable security measures to …

Security 17 Nov 2006, 15:12
Brit jailed for 'web rage'

Chatroom row led to serious beating

A 47-year-old man has been sentenced to two and a half years in prison for what police are describing as Britain's first "web rage" attack. Paul Gibbons of Southwark, south east London, attacked John Jones of Clacton, Essex, after the two had an argument in a Yahoo! chatroom. After the argument Gibbons found enough information …

Music and Media 17 Nov 2006, 15:16
Keeping CodeGear was a no-brainer - sez Borland

Comment Borland changes mind? Deja vu all over again

Why did Borland change its mind about selling off its IDE tools to a third-party? According to Mike Hulme, Borland’s senior director of product marketing, it was a simple decision. “The one-time cash-flow from the sale did not match what we think we can get from an overall profitable business. It’s a no-brainer to say that it’s …

Developer 17 Nov 2006, 15:26
Foreigners, geeks and teachers harm UK IT

BCS slings some mud

IT skills are still in such short supply in the UK that the country's very economic future is threatened, the head of the British Computer Society said today. The apocalyptic warning came the same day the government quango e-skills produced its latest set of horrifying statistics. Sounding like a broken record, both …

IT Director 17 Nov 2006, 15:39
Peaceniks work up to Global Orgasm

NSFW Mass coming together on 22 December

If you've got a few minutes to spare on 22 December, and fancy a quick shag for the advancement of World peace and harmony, then get yourself down to Global Orgasm - a mass coming-together of.. well, no, a mass coming together sums it up quite nicely. The plan is pretty simple: to "effect change in the energy field of the Earth …

Music and Media 17 Nov 2006, 15:54
Jedis use taser guns to shoot down the Queen's speech

Letters And the spoof that spoofed you all

Let's start the letters bag with something that got you really hot under the collar - the spoof Microsoft Firefox site. My, oh my, what a bunch of unhappy readers you were. Some of you even thought we thought it was real (how little credit you give us)... As there's just too much abuse to post, we thought we'd give you the …

Letters 17 Nov 2006, 16:17
Sex with dead deer not illegal, lawyer argues

Wisconsin case hinges on definition of 'animal'

The defence lawyer of a Wisconsin man charged with having sex with a dead deer is claiming he's innocent of any wrongdoing - because a "crimes against sexual morality" statute prohibits sex with animals, but fails to mention carcasses, The Duluth News Tribune reports. Bryan James Hathaway, 20, of Superior, was arrested on "a …

Music and Media 17 Nov 2006, 16:20
Man shot while queuing to buy PlayStation 3

Americans go postal for PS3

A man was shot in Putnam, Connecticut today by a pair of ski-mask wearing gunmen attempting to steal money from a queue of punters waiting in line to buy PlayStation 3 consoles, local police have revealed. According to Lieutenant J Paul Vance, cited by the Associated Press, the would-be thieves threatened 15-20 people …

Reg Hardware 17 Nov 2006, 16:28
eBayer bids $89m for PS3

Going loco

Someone - fool, twit, dunderheard, call them what you will - has apparently agreed to pay more than $89m for a 60GB PlayStation 3. At least he or she doesn't have to pay the shipping cost - the seller is generously including UPS delivery in the price. The console, which the seller pre-ordered in October after queuing outside …

Reg Hardware 17 Nov 2006, 17:38
Mobile 2.0: The phone-in show

Show report Never mind the quality, feel the width

Last week I attended a one-day conference in San Francisco to promote "Mobile 2.0", covering all matters related to new Mobile Web and mobile innovation. It was arranged to coincide with the O'Reilly official Web 2.0 Summit running in the same city and partly, I think, as a reaction to how little that show was talking about …

Mobile 17 Nov 2006, 18:13
Pervhunt site point to Page 3 lovelies

'Hilarious' prank stopped at source

Internet wags have created a site to mark the online publication of a list of child sex offenders who have failed to report to the police. Unlike the real Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre site, pervhunt.com points towards a gallery of Page 3 models from UK tabloid The Sun. The link has now been broken. …

Bootnotes 17 Nov 2006, 18:34
Are carriers learning to love dual-mode?

Nuvoiz sees flat-rate tariffs pushing voice calls onto Wi-Fi

Mobile networks are at last yielding to the lure of dual-mode phones and voice over Wi-Fi, as flat-rate tariffs turn the business of delivering a call into a cost instead of a revenue. That's the claim of Chong-Jin Koh, the head of Nuvoiz, a wireless VoIP start-up. He said that, after years of jealously guarding their voice …

Mobile 17 Nov 2006, 19:17
Online gambling now billion dollar three-card monte

Analysis The wrong ass

Now that the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act has been passed in the United States, those billions of dollars once spent on online gambling will now go to children's recreation centers, programs to care for the elderly, and humble decorations for Mother Theresa's grave. More importantly, those evil mega-casinos that …

Financial News 17 Nov 2006, 19:43
Trusted Computing readies anti-malware specs

Software spec will help apps leverage TPM security chips

The Trusted Computing Group (TCG) is to release its software infrastructure specifications next week. The specs will help technology such as NAC (network access control) determine if a device should be allowed network access or not. They will lay out how applications can use a TPM, or Trusted Platform Module - a secure chip …

Enterprise Security 17 Nov 2006, 19:45
Video game critics' bandwagon rolls backwards

EU commissioner goes walkabout

Keith Vaz, the prominent British Labour MP, jumped back on the anti-video game violence bandwagon today after the EU got it kick-started and on the roll again. But then the funniest thing happened - it appeared to be going backwards. Franco Frattini, speaking beyond his legal remit as EU Justice commissioner, had got a bee in …

Entertainment 17 Nov 2006, 20:55
Panic in Sadville!

Hard lessons for Second Life citizens

Linden Labs, the commercial operation responsible for the much-hyped online "virtual world" Second Life, this week invited its subscribers to sue it for copyright infringement. The bizarre declaration followed a rampage by a software program which cloned material created by Second Life users: their inventions, and identities …

Music and Media 17 Nov 2006, 23:52
Open Source - it isn't just about being nice

Letter Freedom matters

Michael Tiemann objects to the distinction between "open" and "free" software we suggested in the article entitled Is your software free, open or litigated?. Here's Michael's reply in full… Andrew, With these statements, you completely mis-characterize Open Source software and the Open Source movement. By contrast, [ …

Operating Systems 17 Nov 2006, 23:53
UMG sues MySpace

Pay up, Rupert

Two months after threatening to sue Rupert Murdoch's MySpace for copyright infringement, the world's biggest record company has called in the lawyers. In the suit, Universal Music Group says News Corp. "knowingly and intentionally operated its business on the fiction that it has obtained the licenses it needs to exist from …

Music and Media 17 Nov 2006, 23:54